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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Sandra Belloni by George Meredith, v6
+#24 in our series by George Meredith
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+Title: Sandra Belloni by George Meredith, v6
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4418]
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+[This file was first posted on January 4, 2002]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext Sandra Belloni by George Meredith, v6
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+This etext was produced by Pat Castevans  <patcat@ctnet.net>
+and David Widger  <widger@cecomet.net>
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+
+
+
+
+SANDRA BELLONI
+
+By George Meredith
+
+
+
+BOOK 6
+
+XL.       SHE TASTES DESPAIR
+XLI.      SHE IS FOUND
+XLII.     DEFECTION OF MR. PERICLES FROM THE BROOKFIELD CIRCLE
+XLIII.    IN WHICH WE SEE WILFRID KINDLING
+XLIV.     ON THE HIPPOGRIFF IN AIR: IN WHICH THE PHILOSOPHER
+          HAS A SHORT SPELL.
+XLV.      ON THE HIPPOGRIFF ON EARTH.
+XLVI.     RAPE OF THE BLACK-BRIONY WREATH
+XLVII.    THE CALL TO ACTION
+XLVIII.   CONTAINS A FURTHER VIEW OF SENTIMENT
+XLIX.     BETWEEN EMILIA AND GEORGIANA
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+Emilia stretched out her hand and said, "Good-bye."  Seeing that the
+hardened girl, with her dead eyelids, did not appear to feel herself at
+his mercy, and also that Sir Purcell's forehead looked threatening, Mr.
+Pericles stopped his sardonic noise.  He went straight to the door, which
+he opened with alacrity, and mimicking very wretchedly her words of
+adieu, stood prepared to bow her out.  She astonished him by passing
+without another word.  Before he could point a phrase bitter enough for
+expression, Sir Purcell had likewise passed, and in going had given him a
+quietly admonishing look.
+
+"Zose Poles are beggars!" Mr. Pericles roared after them over the stairs,
+and slammed his door for emphasis.  Almost immediately there was a knock
+at it.  Mr. Pericles stood bent and cat-like as Sir Purcell reappeared.
+The latter, avoiding all preliminaries, demanded of the Greek that he
+should promise not to use the names of his friends publicly in such a
+manner again.
+
+"I require a promise for the future.  An apology will be needless from
+you."
+
+"I shall not give it," said Mr. Pericles, with a sharp lift of his upper
+lip.
+
+"But you will give me the promise I have returned for."
+
+In answer Mr. Pericles announced that he had spoken what was simply true:
+that the prosperity of the Poles was fictitious: that he, or any
+unfavourable chance, could ruin them: and that their friends might do
+better to protect their interests than by menacing one who had them in
+his power.
+
+Sir Purcell merely reiterated his demand for the promise, which was
+ultimately snarled to him; whereupon he retired, joy on his features.
+For, Cornelia poor, she might be claimed by him fearlessly: that is to
+say, without the fear of people whispering that the penniless baronet had
+sued for gold, and without the fear of her father rejecting his suit.  At
+least he might, with this knowledge that he had gained, appoint to meet
+her now!  All the morning Sir Purcell had been combative, owing to that
+subordinate or secondary post he occupied in a situation of some
+excitement;--which combativeness is one method whereby men thus placed,
+imagining that they are acting devotedly for their friends, contrive
+still to assert themselves.  He descended to the foot of the stairs,
+where he had told Emilia to wait for him, full of kind feelings and ready
+cheerful counsels; as thus: "Nothing that we possess belongs to us;--All
+will come round rightly in the end; Be patient, look about for amusement,
+and improve your mind."  And more of this copper coinage of wisdom in the
+way of proverbs.  But Emilia was nowhere visible to receive the
+administration of comfort.  Outside the house the fog appeared to have
+swallowed her.  With some chagrin on her behalf (partly a sense of duty
+unfulfilled) Sir Purcell made his way to the residence of the Marinis, to
+report of her there, if she should not have arrived.  The punishment he
+inflicted on himself in keeping his hand an hour from that letter to be
+written to Cornelia, was almost pleasing; and he was rewarded by it, for
+the projected sentences grew mellow and rich, condensed and throbbed
+eloquently.  What wonder, that with such a mental occupation, he should
+pass Emilia and not notice her?  She let him go.
+
+But when he was out of sight, all seemed gone.  The dismally-lighted city
+wore a look of Judgement terrible to see.  Her brain was slave to her
+senses: she fancied she had dropped into an underground kingdom, among a
+mysterious people.  The anguish through which action had just hurried
+her, now fell with a conscious weight upon her heart.  She stood a
+moment, seeing her desolation stretch outwardly into endless labyrinths;
+and then it narrowed and took hold of her as a force within: changing
+thus, almost with each breathing of her body.
+
+The fog had thickened.  Up and down the groping city went muffled men,
+few women.  Emilia looked for one of her sex who might have a tender
+face.  Desire to be kissed and loved by a creature strange to her, and to
+lay her head upon a woman's bosom, moved her to gaze around with a
+longing once or twice; but no eyes met hers, and the fancy recurred
+vividly that she was not in the world she had known.  Otherwise, what had
+robbed her of her voice?  She played with her fancy for comfort, long
+after any real vitality in it had oozed out.  Her having strength to play
+at fancies showed that a spark of hope was alive.  In truth, firm of
+flesh as she was, to believe that all worth had departed from her was
+impossible, and when she reposed simply on her sensations, very little
+trouble beset her: only when she looked abroad did the aspect of numerous
+indifferent faces, and the harsh flowing of the world its own way, tell
+her she had lost her power.  Could it be lost?  The prospect of her
+desolation grew so wide to her that she shut her eyes, abandoning herself
+to feeling; and this by degrees moved her to turn back and throw herself
+at the feet of Mr. Pericles.  For, if he said, "Wait, my child, and all
+will come round well," she was prepared blindly to think so.  The
+projection of the words in her mind made her ready to weep: but as she
+neared the house of his office the wish to hear him speak that, became
+passionate; she counted all that depended on it, and discovered the size
+of the fabric she had built on so thin a plank.  After a while, her steps
+were mechanically swift.  Before she reached the chambers of Mr. Pericles
+she had walked, she knew not why, once round the little quiet enclosed
+city-garden, and a cold memory of those men who had looked at her face
+gave her some wonder, to be quickly kindled into fuller comprehension.
+
+Beholding Emilia once more, Mr. Pericles enjoyed a revival of his taste
+for vengeance; but, unhappily for her, he found it languid, and when he
+had rubbed his hands, stared, and by sundry sharp utterances brought her
+to his feet, his satisfaction was less poignant than he had expected.  As
+a consequence, instead of speaking outrageously, according to his habit,
+in wrath, he was now frigidly considerate, informing Emilia that it would
+be good for her if she were dead, seeing that she was of no use whatever;
+but, as she was alive, she had better go to her father and mother, and
+learn knitting, or some such industrial employment.  "Unless zat man for
+whom you play fool!--"  Mr. Pericles shrugged the rest of his meaning.
+
+"But my voice may not be gone," urged Emilia.  "I may sing to you to-
+morrow--this evening.  It must be the fog.  Why do you think it lost?  It
+can't be--"
+
+"Cracked!" cried Mr. Pericles.
+
+"It is not!  No; do not think it.  I may stay here.  Don't tell me to go
+yet.  The streets make me wish to die.  And I feel I may, perhaps, sing
+presently.  Wait.  Will you wait?"
+
+A hideous imitation of her lamentable tones burst from Mr. Pericles.
+"Cracked!" he cried again.
+
+Emilia lifted her eyes, and looked at him steadily.  She saw the idea
+grow in the eyes fronting her that she had a pleasant face, and she at
+once staked this little bit of newly-conceived worth on an immediate
+chance.  Remember; that she was as near despair as a creature constituted
+so healthily could go.  Speaking no longer in a girlish style, but with
+the grave pleading manner of a woman, she begged Mr. Pericles to take her
+to Italy, and have faith in the recovery of her voice.  He, however, far
+from being softened, as he grew aware of her sweetness of feature, waxed
+violent and insulting.
+
+"Take me," she said.  "My voice will reward you.  I feel that you can
+cure it."
+
+"For zat man! to go to him again!"  Mr. Pericles sneered.
+
+"I never shall do that."  There sprang a glitter as of steel in Emilia's
+eyes.  "I will make myself yours for life, if you like.  Take my hand,
+and let me swear.  I do not break my word.  I will swear, that if I
+recover my voice to become what you expected,--I will marry you whenever
+you ask me, and then--"
+
+More she was saying, but Mr. Pericles, sputtering a laugh of "Sanks!"
+presented a postured supplication for silence.
+
+"I am not a man who marries."
+
+He plainly stated the relations that the woman whom he had distinguished
+by the honours of selection must hold toward him.
+
+Emilia's cheeks did not redden; but, without any notion of shame at the
+words she listened to, she felt herself falling lower and lower the more
+her spirit clung to Mr. Pericles: yet he alone was her visible
+personification of hope, and she could not turn from him.  If he cast her
+off, it seemed to her that her voice was condemned.  She stood there
+still, and the cold-eyed Greek formed his opinion.
+
+He was evidently undecided as regards his own course of proceeding, for
+his chin was pressed by thumb and forefinger hard into his throat, while
+his eyebrows were wrinkled up to their highest elevation.  From this
+attitude, expressive of the accurate balancing of the claims of an
+internal debate, he emerged into the posture of a cock crowing, and
+Emilia heard again his bitter mimicry of her miserable broken tones,
+followed by Ha! dam!  Basta! basta!"
+
+"Sit here," cried Mr. Pericles.  He had thrown himself into a chair, and
+pointed to his knee.
+
+Emilia remained where she was standing.
+
+He caught at her hand, but she plucked that from him.  Mr. Pericles rose,
+sounding a cynical "Hein!"
+
+"Don't touch me," said Emilia.
+
+Nothing exasperates certain natures so much as the effort of the visibly
+weak to intimidate them.
+
+"I shall not touch you?" Mr. Pericles sneered.  "Zen, why are you here?"
+
+"I came to my friend," was Emilia's reply.
+
+"Your friend!  He is not ze friend of a couac-couac.  Once, if you
+please: but now" (Mr. Pericles shrugged), "now you are like ze rest of
+women.  You are game.  Come to me."
+
+He caught once more at her hand, which she lifted; then at her elbow.
+
+"Will you touch me when I tell you not to?"
+
+There was the soft line of an involuntary frown over her white face, and
+as he held her arm from the doubled elbow, with her clenched hand aloft,
+she appeared ready to strike a tragic blow.
+
+Anger and every other sentiment vanished from Mr. Pericles in the
+rapturous contemplation of her admirable artistic pose.
+
+"Mon Dieu! and wiz a voice!" he exclaimed, dashing his fist in a delirium
+of forgetfulness against the one plastered lock of hair on his shining
+head.  "Little fool! little dam fool!--zat might have been"--(Mr.
+Pericles figured in air with his fingers to signify the exaltation she
+was to have attained)--"Mon Dieu! and look at you!  Did I not warn you?
+non a vero?  Did I not say 'Ruin, ruin, if you go so?  For a man!--a
+voice!  You will not come to me?  Zen, hear! you shall go to old
+Belloni.  I do not want you, my pretty dear.  Woman is a trouble, a drug.
+You shall go to old Belloni; and, crack! if ze voice will come back to a
+whip,--bravo, old Belloni!"
+
+Mr. Pericles turned to reach down his hat from a peg.  At the same
+instant Emilia quitted the room.
+
+Dusk was deepening the yellow atmosphere, and the crowd was now steadily
+flowing in one direction.  The bereaved creature went with the stream,
+glad to be surrounded and unseen, till it struck her, at last, that she
+was moving homeward.  She stopped with a pang of grief, turned, and met
+all those people to whom the fireside was a beacon.  For some time she
+bore against the pressure, but her loneliness overwhelmed her.  None
+seemed to go her way.  For a refuge, she turned into one of the city side
+streets, where she was quite alone.  Unhappily, the street was of no
+length, and she soon came to the end of it.  There was the choice of
+retracing her steps, or entering a strange street; and while she
+hesitated a troop of sheep went by, that made a piteous noise.  She
+followed them, thinking curiously of the something broken that appeared
+to be in their throats.  By-and-by, the thought flashed in her that they
+were going to be slaughtered.  She held her step, looking at them, but
+without any tender movement of the heart.  They came to a butcher's yard,
+and went in.
+
+When she had passed along a certain distance, a shiver seized her, and
+her instinct pushed her toward the lighted shops, where there were
+pictures.  In one she saw the portrait of that Queen of Song whom she had
+heard at Besworth.  Two young men, glancing as they walked by arm in arm,
+pronounced the name of the great enchantress, and hummed one of her
+triumphant airs.  The features expressed health, humour, power, every
+fine animal faculty.  Genius was on the forehead and the plastic mouth;
+the forehead being well projected, fair, and very shapely, showing clear
+balance, as well as capacity to grasp flame, and fling it.  The line
+reaching to a dimple from the upper lip was saved from scornfulness by
+the lovely gleam, half-challenging, half-consoling, regal, roguish--what
+you would--that sat between her dark eyelashes, like white sunlight on
+the fringed smooth roll of water by a weir.  Such a dimple, and such a
+gleam of eyes, would have been keys to the face of a weakling, and it was
+the more fascinating from the disregard of any minor charm notable upon
+this grand visage, which could not suffer a betrayal.  You saw, and there
+was no effort to conceal, that the spirit animating it was intensely
+human; but it was human of the highest chords of humanity, indifferent to
+finesse and despising subtleties; gifted to speak, to inspire, and to
+command all great emotions.  In fact, it was the masque of a dramatic
+artist in repose.  Tempered by beauty, the robust frame showed that she
+possessed a royal nature, and could, as a foremost qualification for Art,
+feel harmoniously.  She might have many of the littlenesses of which
+women are accused; for Art she promised unspotted excellence; and,
+adorable as she was by attraction of her sex, she was artist over all.
+
+Emilia found herself on one of the bridges, thinking of this aspect.
+Beneath her was the stealing river, with its red intervals, and the fog
+had got a wider circle.  She could not disengage that face from her mind.
+It seemed to say to her, boldly, "I live because success is mine;" and to
+hint, as with a paler voice, "Death the fruit of failure."  Could she,
+Emilia, ever be looked on again by her friends?  The dread of it gave her
+shudders.  Then, death was certainly easy!  But death took no form in her
+imagination, as it does to one seeking it.  She desired to forget and to
+hide her intolerable losses; to have the impostor she felt herself to be
+buried.  As she walked along she held out her hands, murmuring,
+"Helpless! useless!"  It came upon her as a surprise that one like
+herself should be allowed to live.  "I don't want to," she said; and the
+neat moment, "I wonder what a drowned woman is like?"  She hurried back
+to the streets and the shops.  The shops failed now to give her
+distraction, for a stiff and dripping image floated across all the
+windows, and she was glad to see the shutters being closed; though, when
+the streets were dark, some friendliness seemed to have gone.  When the
+streets were quits dark, save for the row of lamps, she walked fast,
+fearing she knew not what.
+
+A little Italian boy sat doubled over his organ on a doorstep, while a
+yet smaller girl at his elbow plied him with questions in English.
+Emilia stopped before them, and the girl complained to her that the
+perverse little foreigner would not answer.  Two or three words in his
+native tongue soon brought his face to view.  Emilia sat down between
+them, and listened to the prattle of two languages.  The girl said that
+she never had supper, which was also the case with the boy; so Emilia
+felt for her purse, and sent the girl with sixpence in search of a shop
+that sold cafes.  The girl came back with her apron full.  As they were
+all about to eat, a policeman commanded them to quit the spot, informing
+them that he knew both them and their dodges.  Emilia stood up, and was
+taking her little people away, when the policeman, having suddenly
+changed his accurate opinion of her, said, "You're giving 'em some
+supper, miss?  Oh, they must sit down to their suppers, you know!" and
+walked away, not to be a witness of this infraction of the law.  So, they
+sat down and ate, and the boy and girl tried to say intelligible things
+to one another, and laughed.  Emilia could not help joining in their
+laughter.  The girl was very anxious to know whether the boy was ever
+beaten, and hearing that he was, she appeared better satisfied, remarking
+that she was also, but curious still as to the different forms of
+chastisement they received.  This being partially explained, she wished
+to know whether he would be beaten that night, Emilia interpreting.  A
+grin, and a rapid whistle and 'cluck,' significant of the application of
+whips, told the state of his expectations; at which the girl clapped her
+hands, adding, lamentably, "So shall I, 'cause I am always."  Emilia
+gathered them under each shoulder, when, to her delight and half
+perplexity, they closed their eyes, leaning against her.
+
+The policeman passed, and for an hour endured this spectacle.  At last he
+felt compelled to explain to Emilia what were the sentiments of
+gentlefolks with regard to their doorsteps, apart from the law of the
+matter.  He put it to her human nature whether she would like her
+doorsteps to be blocked, so that no one could enter, and anyone emerging
+stood a chance of being precipitated, nose foremost, upon the pavement.
+Then, again, as gentle-folks had good experience of, the young ones in
+London were twice as cunning as the old.  Emilia pleaded for her sleeping
+pair, that they might not be disturbed.  Her voice gave the keeper of the
+peace notions of her being one of the eccentric young ladies who are
+occasionally 'missing,' and have advertizing friends.  He uttered a stern
+ahem! preliminary to assent; but the noise wakened the children, who
+stared, and readily obeyed his gesture, which said, "Be off!" while his
+words were those of remonstrance.  Emilia accompanied them a little way.
+Both promised eagerly that they would be at the same place the night
+following and departed--the boy with laughing nods and waving of hands,
+which the girl imitated.  Emilia's feeling of security went with them.
+She at once feigned a destination in the distance, and set forward to
+reach it, but the continued exposure of this delusion made it difficult
+to renew.  She fell to counting the hours that were to elapse before she
+would meet those children, saying to herself, that whatever she did she
+must keep her engagement to be at the appointed steps.  This restriction
+set her darkly fancying that she wished for her end.
+
+Remembering those men who had looked at her admiringly, "Am I worth
+looking at?" she said; and it gave her some pleasure to think that she
+had it still in her power to destroy a thing of value.  She was savagely
+ashamed of going to death empty-handed.  By-and-by, great fatigue
+stiffened her limbs, and she sat down from pure want of rest.  The luxury
+of rest and soothing languor kept hard thoughts away.  She felt as if
+floating, for a space.  The fear of the streets left her.  But when
+necessity for rest had gone, she clung to the luxury still, and sitting
+bent forward, with her hands about her knees, she began to brood over
+tumbled images of a wrong done to her.  She had two distinct visions of
+herself, constantly alternating and acting like the temptation of two
+devils.  One represented her despicable in feature, and bade her die; the
+other showed a fair face, feeling which to be her own, Emilia had fits of
+intolerable rage.  This vision prevailed; and this wicked side of her
+humanity saved her.  Active despair is a passion that must be superseded
+by a passion.  Passive despair comes later; it has nothing to do with
+mental action, and is mainly a corruption or degradation of our blood.
+The rage in Emilia was blind at first, but it rose like a hawk, and
+singled its enemy.  She fixed her mind to conceive the foolishness of
+putting out a face that her rival might envy, and of destroying anything
+that had value.  The flattery of beauty came on her like a warm garment.
+When she opened her eyes, seeing what she was and where, she almost
+smiled at the silly picture that had given her comfort.  Those men had
+looked on her admiringly, it was true, but would Wilfrid have ceased to
+love her if she had been beautiful?  An extraordinary intuition of
+Wilfrid's sentiment tormented her now.  She saw herself in the light that
+he would have seen her by, till she stood with the sensations of an
+exposed criminal in the dark length of the street, and hurried down it,
+back, as well as she could find her way, to the friendly policeman.
+
+Her question on reaching him, "Are you married?" was prodigiously
+astonishing, and he administered the rebuff of an affirmative with
+severity.  "Then," said Emilia, "when you go home, let me go with you to
+your wife.  Perhaps she will consent to take care of me for this night."
+The policeman coughed mildly and replied,  "It's plain you know nothing
+of women--begging your pardon, miss,--for I can see you're a lady."
+Emilia repeated her petition, and the policeman explained the nature of
+women.  Not to be baffled, Emilia said, "I think your wife must be a good
+woman."  Hereat the policeman laughed, arming "that the best of them knew
+what bad suspicions was."  Ultimately, he consented to take her to his
+wife, when he was relieved, after the term of so many minutes.  Emilia
+stood at a distance, speculating on the possible choice he would make of
+a tune to accompany his monotonous walk to and fro, and on the certainty
+of his wearing any tune to nothing.
+
+She was in a bed, sleeping heavily, a little before dawn.
+
+The day that followed was her day of misery.  The blow that had stunned
+her had become as a loud intrusive pulse in her head.  By this new
+daylight she fathomed the depth, and reckoned the value, of her loss.
+And her senses had no pleasure in the light, though there was sunshine.
+The woman who was her hostess was kind, but full of her first surprise at
+the strange visit, and too openly ready for any information the young
+lady might be willing to give with regard to her condition, prospects,
+and wishes.  Emilia gave none.  She took the woman's hand, asking
+permission to remain under her protection.  The woman by-and-by named a
+sum of money as a sum for weekly payment, and Emilia transferred all to
+her that she had.  The policeman and his wife thought her, though
+reasonable, a trifle insane.  She sat at a window for hours watching a
+'last man' of the fly species walking up and plunging down a pane of
+glass.  On this transparent solitary field for the most objectless
+enterprise ever undertaken, he buzzed angrily at times, as if he had
+another meaning in him, which was being wilfully misinterpreted.  Then he
+mounted again at his leisure, to pitch backward as before.  Emilia found
+herself thinking with great seriousness that it was not wonderful for
+boys to be always teasing and killing flies, whose thin necks and bobbing
+heads themselves suggested the idea of decapitation.  She said to her
+hostess: "I don't like flies.  They seem never to sing but when they are
+bothered."  The woman replied: "Ah, indeed?" very smoothly, and thought:
+"If you was to bust out now, which of us two would be strongest?"  Emilia
+grew distantly aware that the policeman and his wife talked of her and
+watched her with combined observation.
+
+When it was night she went to keep her appointment.  The girl was there,
+but the boy came late.  He said he had earned only a few pence that day,
+and would be beaten.  He spoke in a whimpering tone which caused the girl
+to desire a translation of his words.  Emilia told her how things were
+with him, and the girl expressed a wish that she had an organ, as in that
+case she would be sure to earn more than sixpence a day; such being the
+amount that procured her nightly a comfortable reception in the arms of
+her parents.  "Do you like music?" said Emilia.  The girl replied that
+she liked organs; but, as if to avoid committing an injustice, cited
+parrots as foremost in her affections.  Holding them both to her breast,
+Emilia thought that she would rescue them from this beating by giving
+them the money they had to offer for kindness: but the restlessness of
+the children suddenly made her a third party to the thought of cakes.
+She had no money.  Her heart bled for the poor little hungry,
+apprehensive creatures.  For a moment she half fancied she had her voice,
+and looked up at the windows of the pitiless houses with a bold look; but
+there was a speedy mockery of her thought "You shall listen: you shall
+open!"  She coughed hoarsely, and then fell into fits of crying.  Her
+friend the policeman came by and took her arm with a force that he meant
+to be persuasive; so lifting her and handing her some steps beyond the
+limit of his beat, with stern directions for her to proceed home
+immediately.  She obeyed.  Next day she asked her hostess to lend her
+half-a-crown.  The woman snapped shortly in answer: "No; the less you
+have the better."  Emilia was obliged to abandon her little people.
+
+She was to this extent the creature of mania: that she could not conceive
+of a way being open by which she might return to her father and mother,
+or any of her friends.  It was to her not a matter for her will to decide
+upon, but simply a black door shut that nothing could displace.  When the
+week, for which term of shelter she had paid, was ended, her hostess
+spoke upon this point, saying, more to convince Emilia of the necessity
+for seeking her friends than from any unkindness: "Me and my husband
+can't go on keepin' you, you know, my dear, however well's our meaning."
+Emilia drew the woman toward her with both her lands, softly shaking her
+head.  She left the house about noon.
+
+It was now her belief that she had probably no more than another day to
+live, for she was destitute of money.  The thought relieved her from that
+dreadful fear of the street, and she walked at her own pace, even after
+dark.  The rumble and the rattle of wheels; the cries and grinding
+noises; the hum of motion and talk; all under the lingering smoky red of
+a London Winter sunset, were not discord to her animated blood.  Her
+unhunted spirit made a music of them.  It was not like the music of other
+days, nor was the exultation it created at all like happiness: but she at
+least forgot herself.  Voices came in her ear, and hung unheard until
+long after the speaker had passed.  Hunger did not assail her.  She was
+not beset by an animal weakness; and having in her mind no image of
+death, and with her ties to life cut away;--thus devoid of apprehension
+or regret, she was what her quick blood made her, for the time.  She
+recognized that, for one near extinction, it was useless to love or to
+hate: so Wilfrid and Lady Charlotte were spared.  Emilia thought of them
+both with a sort of equanimity; not that any clear thought filled her
+brain through that delirious night.  The intoxicating music raged there
+at one level depression, never rising any scale, never undulating ever so
+little, scarcely changing its barbarous monotony of notes.  She had no
+power over it.  Her critical judgement would at another moment have
+shrieked at it.  She was moved by it as by a mechanical force.
+
+The South-west wind blew, and the hours of the night were not evil to
+outcasts.  Emilia saw many lying about, getting rest where they might.
+She hurried her eye pityingly over little children, but the devil that
+had seized her sprang contempt for the others--older beggars, who
+appeared to succumb to their fate when they should have lifted their
+heads up bravely.  On she passed from square to market, market to park;
+and presently her mind shot an arrow of desire for morning, which was
+nothing less than hunger beginning to stir.  "When will the shops open?"
+She tried to cheat herself by replying that she did not care when, but
+pangs of torment became too rapid for the counterfeit.  Her imagination
+raised the roof from those great rich houses, and laid bare a brilliancy
+of dish-covers; and if any sharp gust of air touched the nerve in her
+nostril, it seemed instantaneously charged with the smell of old dinners.
+"No," cried Emilia, "I dislike anything but plain food."  She quickly
+gave way, and admitted a craving for dainty morsels.  "One lump of
+sugar!" she subsequently sighed.  But neither sugar nor meat approached
+her.
+
+Her seat was under trees, between a man and a woman who slanted from her
+with hidden chins.  The chilly dry leaves began to waken, and the sky
+showed its grey.  Hunger had become as a leaden ball in Emilia's chest.
+She could have eaten eagerly still, but she had no ravenous images of
+food.  Nevertheless, she determined to beg for bread at a baker's shop.
+Coming into the empty streets again, the dread of exposing her solitary
+wretchedness and the stains of night upon her, kept her back.  When she
+did venture near the baker's shop, her sensation of weariness, want of
+washing, and general misery, made her feel a contrast to all other women
+she saw, that robbed her of the necessary effrontery.  She preferred to
+hide her head.
+
+The morning hours went in this conflict.  She was between-whiles hungry
+and desperate, or stricken with shame.  Fatigue, bringing the imperious
+necessity for rest, intervened as a relief.  Emilia moaned at the weary
+length of the light, but when dusk fell and she beheld flame in the
+lamps, it seemed to be too sudden and she was alarmed.  Passive despair
+had set in.  She felt sick, though not weak, and the thought of asking
+help had gone.
+
+A street urchin, of the true London species, in whom excess of woollen
+comforter made up for any marked scantiness in the rest of his attire,
+came trotting the pavement, pouring one of the favourite tunes of his
+native metropolis through the tube of a penny-whistle, from which it did
+not issue so disguised but that attentive ears might pronounce it the
+royal march of the Cannibal Islands.  A placarded post beside a lamp met
+this musician's eye; and, still piping, he bent his knees and read the
+notification.  Emilia thought of the Hillford and Ipley clubmen, the big
+drum, the speeches, the cheers, and all the wild strength that lay in her
+that happy morning.  She watched the boy piping as if he were reading
+from a score, and her sense of humour was touched.  "You foolish boy!"
+she said to herself softly.  But when, having evidently come to the last
+printed line, the boy rose and pocketed his penny-whistle, Emilia was
+nearly laughing.  "That's because he cannot turn over the leaf," she
+said, and stood by the post till long after the boy had disappeared.  The
+slight emotion of fun had restored to her some of her lost human
+sensations, and she looked about for a place where to indulge them
+undisturbed.  One of the bridges was in sight She yearned for the
+solitude of the wharf beside it, and hurried to the steps.  To descend
+she had to pass a street-organ and a small figure bent over it.  "Sei
+buon' Italiano?" she said.  The answer was a surly "Si."  Emilia cried
+convulsively "Addio!"  Her brain had become on a sudden vacant of a
+thought, and all she knew was that she descended.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+"Sei buon' Italiana?"
+
+Across what chasm did the words come to her?
+
+It seemed but a minutes and again many hours back, that she had asked
+that question of a little fellow, who, if he had looked up and nodded
+would have given her great joy, but who kept his face dark from her and
+with a sullen "Si" extinguished her last feeling of a desire for
+companionship with life.
+
+"Si," she replied, quite as sullenly, and without looking up.
+
+But when her hand was taken and other words were uttered, she that had
+crouched there so long between death and life immovable, loving neither,
+rose possessed of a passion for the darkness and the void, and struggling
+bitterly with the detaining hand, crying for instant death.  No strength
+was in her to support the fury.
+
+"Merthyr Powys is with you," said her friend, "and will never leave you."
+
+"Will never take me up there?"  Emilia pointed to the noisy level above
+them.
+
+"Listen, and I will tell you how I have found you," replied Merthyr.
+
+"Don't force me to go up."
+
+She spoke from the end of her breath.  Merthyr feared that it was more
+than misery, even madness, afflicting her.  He sat on the wharf-bench
+silent till she was reassured.  But at his first words, the eager
+question came: "You will not force me to go up there?"
+
+"No; we can stay and talk here," said Merthyr.  "And this is how I have
+found you.  Do you suppose you have been hidden from us all this time?
+Perhaps you fancy you do not belong to your friends?  Well, I spoke to
+all of your 'children,' as you used to call them.  Do you remember?  The
+day before yesterday two had seen you.  You said to one, 'From Savoy or
+Piedmont?'  He said, 'From Savoy;' and you shook your head: 'Not looking
+on Italy!' you said.  This night I roused one of them, and he stretched
+his finger down the steps, saying that you had gone down there.  'Sei
+buon' Italiano?" you said.  "And that is how I have found you.  Sei buon'
+Italiana?"
+
+Emilia let her hand rest in Merthyr's, wondering to think that there
+should be no absolute darkness for a creature to escape into while
+living.  A trembling came on her.  "Let me look over at the water," she
+said; and Merthyr, who trusted her even in that extremity, allowed her to
+lean forward, and felt her grasp grow moist in his, till she turned back
+with shudders, giving him both her hands.  "A drowned woman looks so
+dreadful!"  Her speech was faint as she begged to be taken away from that
+place.  Merthyr put his hand to her arm-pit, sustaining her steps.  As
+they neared the level where men were, she looked behind her and realized
+the black terrors she had just been blindly handling.  Fright sped her
+limbs for a second or two, and then her whole weight hung upon Merthyr.
+He held her in both arms, thinking that she had swooned, but she
+murmured: "Have you heard that my voice has gone?"
+
+"If you have suffered, I do not wonder," he said.
+
+"I am useless.  My voice is dead."
+
+"Useless to your friends?  Tush, my little Emilia!  Sandra mia!  Don't
+you know that while you love your friends that's all they want of you?"
+
+"Oh!" she moaned; "the gas-lamp hurts me.  What a noise there is!"
+
+"We shall soon get away from the noise."
+
+"No; I like it; but not the light.  Oh, my feet!--why are you walking
+still?  What friends?"
+
+"For instance, myself."
+
+"You knew of my wandering about London!  It makes me believe in heaven.
+I can't bear to think of being unseen."
+
+"This morning," said Merthyr, "I saw the policeman in whose house you
+have been staying."
+
+Emilia bowed her head to the mystery by which this friend was endowed to
+be cognizant of her actions.  "I feel that I have not seen the streets
+for years.  If it were not for you I should fall down.--Oh! do you
+understand that my voice has quite gone?"
+
+Merthyr perceived her anxiety to be that she might not betaken on
+doubtful terms.  "Your hand hasn't," he said, pressing it, and so
+gratified her with a concrete image of something that she could still
+bestow upon a friend.  To this she clung while the noisy wheels bore her
+through London, till her weak body failed to keep courage in her breast,
+and she wept and came closer to Merthyr.  He who supposed that her recent
+despair and present tears were for the loss of her lover, gave happily
+more comfort than he took.  "When old gentlemen choose to interest
+themselves about very young ladies," he called upon his humorous
+philosophy to observe internally, as men do to forestall the possible
+cynic external;--and the rest of the sentence was acted under his eyes by
+the figures of three persons.  But, there she was, lying within his arm,
+rescued, the creature whom he had found filling his heart, when lost, and
+whom he thought one of the most hopeful of the women of earth!  He
+thanked God for bare facts.  She lay against him with her eyelids softly
+joined, and as he felt the breathing of her body, he marvelled to think
+how matter-of-fact they had both been on the brink of a tragedy, and how
+naturally she had, as it were, argued herself up to the gates of death.
+For want of what?  "My sister may supply it," thought Merthyr.
+
+"Oh! that river is like a great black snake with a sick eye, and will
+come round me!" said Emilia, talking as from sleep; then started, with
+fright in her face: "Oh! my hunger again!"
+
+"Hunger!" said he, horrified.
+
+"It comes worse than ever," she moaned.  "I was half dead just now, and
+didn't feel it.  There's--there's no pain in death.  But this--it's like
+fire and frost!  I feel being eaten up.  Give me something."
+
+Merthyr set his teeth and enveloped her in a tight hug that relieved her
+from the sharper pangs; and so held her, the tears bursting through his
+shut eyelids, till at the first hotel they reached he managed to get food
+for her.  She gave a little gasping cry when he put bread through the
+window of the cab.  Bit by bit he handed her the morsels.  It was
+impossible to procure broth.  When they drove on, she did not complain of
+suffering, but her chest rose and fell many times heavily.  She threw him
+out in the reading of her character, after a space, by excusing herself
+for having eaten with such eagerness; and it was long before he learnt
+what Wilfrid's tyrannous sentiment had done to this simple nature.  He
+understood better the fear she expressed of meeting Georgiana.
+Nevertheless, she exhibited none on entering the house, and returned
+Georgiana's embrace with what strength was left to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+Up the centre aisle of Hillford Church, the Tinleys (late as usual) were
+seen trooping for morning service in midwinter.  There was a man in the
+rear known to be a man by the sound of his boots and measure of his
+stride, for the ladies of Brookfield, having rejected the absurd
+pretensions of Albert Tinley, could not permit curiosity to encounter the
+risk of meeting his gaze by turning their heads.  So, with charitable
+condescension they returned the slight church nod of prim Miss Tinley
+passing, of the detestable Laura Tinley, of affected Rose Tinley (whose
+complexion was that of a dust-bin), and of Madeline Tinley (too young for
+a character beyond what the name bestowed), and then they arranged their
+prayer-books, and apparently speculated as to the possible text that
+morning to be given forth from the pulpit.  But it seemed to them all
+that an exceedingly bulky object had passed as guardian of the light-
+footed damsels preceding him.  Though none of the ladies had looked up as
+he passed, they were conscious of a stature and a circumference which
+they had deemed to be entirely beyond the reach of the Tinleys, and a
+scornful notion of the Tinleys having hired a guardsman, made Arabella
+smile at the stretch of her contempt, that could help her to conceive the
+ironic possibility.  Relieved on the suspicion that Albert was in
+attendance of his sisters, they let their eyes fall calmly on the Tinley
+pew.  Could two men upon this earthly sphere possess such a bearskin?
+There towered the shoulders of Mr. Pericles; his head looking diminished
+by the hugeous collar.  Arabella felt a seizure of her hand from Adela's
+side.  She placed her book open before her, and stared at the pulpit.
+From neither of the three of Brookfield could Laura's observation extract
+a sign of the utter astonishment she knew they must be experiencing; and
+had it not been for the ingenuous broad whisper of Mrs. Chump, which
+sounded toward the verge even of her conception of possibilities, the
+Tinleys would not have been gratified by the first public display of the
+prize they had wrested from the Poles.
+
+"Mr. Paricles--oh!" went Mrs. Chump, and a great many pews were set in
+commotion.
+
+Forthwith she bent over Cornelia's lap, and Cornelia, surveying her
+placidly, had to murmur, "By-and-by; by-and-by."
+
+"But, did ye see 'm, my dear?  and a forr'ner in a Protestant Church!
+And such a forr'ner as he is, to be sure!  And, ye know, ye said he'd
+naver come with you, and it's them creatures ye don't like.  Corrnelia!"
+
+"The service commences," remarked that lady, standing up.
+
+Many eyes were on Mr. Pericles, who occasionally inspected the cornices
+and corbels and stained glass to right and left, or detected a young lady
+staring at him, or anticipated her going to stare, and put her to
+confusion by a sharp turn of his head, and then a sniff and smoothing
+down of his moustache.  But he did not once look at the Brookfield pew.
+By hazard his eye ranged over it, and after the first performance of this
+trick he would have found the ladies a match for him, even if he had
+sought to challenge their eyes.  They were constrained to admit that
+Laura Tinley managed him cleverly.  She made him hold a book and appear
+respectably devout.  She got him down in good time when seats were taken,
+and up again, without much transparent persuasion.  The first notes of
+the organ were seen to agitate the bearskin.  Laura had difficulty to
+induce the man to rise for the hymn, and when he had listened to the
+intoning of a verse, Mr. Pericles suddenly bent, as if he had snapped in
+two: nor could Laura persuade him to rejoin the present posture of the
+congregation.  Then only did Laura, to cover her failure, turn the
+subdued light of a merry smile upon the Brookfield pew.
+
+The smile was noticed by Apprehension sitting in the corner of one eye,
+and it was likewise known that Laura's chagrin at finding that she was
+not being watched affected her visibly.  At the termination of the
+sermon, the ladies bowed their heads a short space, and placing Mrs.
+Chump in front drove her out, so that her exclamations of wonderment, and
+affectedly ostentatious gaspings of sympathy for Brookfield, were heard
+by few.  On they hurried, straight and fast to Brookfield.  Mr. Pole was
+talking to Tracy Runningbrook at the gate.  The ladies cut short his
+needless apology to the young man for not being found in church that day,
+by asking questions of Tracy.  The first related to their brother's
+whereabouts; the second to Emilia's condition.  Tracy had no time to
+reply.  Mrs. Chump had identified herself with Brookfield so warmly that
+the defection of Mr. Pericles was a fine legitimate excitement to her.
+"I hate 'm!" she cried.  "I pos'tively hate the man!  And he to go to
+church!  A pretty figure for an angel--he, now!  But, my dears, we cann't
+let annybody else have 'm.  Shorrt of his bein' drowned or killed, we
+must intrigue to keep the wretch to ourselves."
+
+"Oh, dear!" said Adela impatiently.
+
+"Well, and I didn't say to myself, ye little jealous thing!" retorted
+Mrs. Chump.
+
+"Indeed, ma'am, you are welcome to him."
+
+"And indeed, miss, I don't want 'm.  And, perhaps, ye were flirtin' all
+the fun out of him on board the yacht, and got tired of 'm; and that's
+why."
+
+Adela said: "Thank you," with exasperating sedateness, which provoked an
+intemperate outburst from Mrs. Chump.  "Sunday! Sunday!" cried Mr. Pole.
+
+"Ain't I the first to remember ut, Pole?  And didn't I get up airly so as
+to go to church and have my conscience qui't, and 'stead of that I come
+out full of evil passions, all for the sake o' these ungrateful garls
+that's always where ye cann't find 'em.  Why, if they was to be married
+at the altar, they'd stare and be 'ffendud if ye asked them if they was
+thinking of their husbands, they would!  'Oh, dear, no! and ye're
+mistaken, and we're thinkin' o' the coal-scuttle in the back parlour,'--
+or somethin' about souls, if not coals.  There's their answer.  What did
+ye do with Mr. Paricles on board the yacht?  Aha!"
+
+"What's this about Pericles?" said Mr. Pole.
+
+"Oh, nothing, Papa," returned Adela.
+
+"Nothing, do ye call ut!" said Mrs. Chump.  "And, mayhap, good cause too.
+Didn't ye tease 'm, now, on board the yacht?  Now, did he go on board the
+yacht at all?"
+
+"I should think you ought to know that as well as Adela," said Mr. Pole.
+
+Adela interposed, hurriedly: "All this, my dear Papa, is because Mr.
+Pericles has thought proper to visit the Tinleys' pew.  Who would
+complain how or where he does it, so long as the duty is fulfilled?"
+
+Mr. Pole stared, muttering: "The Tinleys!"
+
+"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', fiirtin'!  And go and see what the noble
+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 scrape.  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!" ejaculated 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 passed 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
+chastisement 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 sex'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 butterfly 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 wineglass 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
+glass.  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 snatch 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 petition 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 mass 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 scrapes.  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 noblest 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 assiduous 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 noble 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 compassed
+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 pass 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 pass 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 coarse 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 passive 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, coarse: 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 sex 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 ennobling 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 sex, 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.'
+
+So let us leave them, till we come upon the ashy fruit of which this
+blooming sentimentalism is the seed.
+
+It was past midnight when Mrs. Chump rushed to Arabella's room, and her
+knock was heard vociferous at the door.  The ladies, who were at work
+upon diaries and letters, allowed her to thump and wonder whether she had
+come to the wrong door, for a certain period; after which, Arabella
+placidly unbolted her chamber, and Adela presented herself in the passage
+to know the meaning of the noise.
+
+"Oh! ye poor darlin's, I've heard ut all, I have."
+
+This commencement took the colour from their cheeks.  Arabella invited
+her inside, and sent Adela for Cornelia.
+
+"Oh, and ye poor deers!" cried Mrs. Chump to Arabella, who remarked:
+"Pray wait till my sisters come;" causing the woman to stare and observe:
+"If ye're not as cold as the bottom of a pot that naver felt fire."  She
+repeated this to Cornelia and Adela as an accusation, and then burst on
+"My heart's just breakin' for ye, and ye shall naver want bread, eh! and
+roast beef, and my last bottle of Port ye'll share, though ye've no ideea
+what a lot o' thoughts o' poor Chump's under that cork, and it'll be a
+waste on you.  Oh! and that monster of a Mr. Paricles that's got ye in
+his power and's goin' to be the rroon of ye--shame to 'm!  Your father's
+told me; and, oh! my darlin' garls, don't think ut my fault.  For, Pole--
+Pole--"
+
+Mrs. Chump was choked by her grief.  The ladies, unbending to some
+curiosity, eliminated from her gasps and sobs that Mr. Pole had, in the
+solitude of his library below, accused her of causing the defection of
+Mr. Pericles, and traced his possible ruin to it, confessing, that in the
+way of business, he was at Mr. Pericles' mercy.
+
+"And in such a passion with me!" Mrs. Chump wrung her hands.  "What could
+I do to Mr. Paricles?  He isn't one o' the men that I can kiss; and Pole
+shouldn't wish me.  And Pole settin' down his rroon to me!  What'll I do?
+My dears! I do feel for ye, for I feel I'd feel myself such a beast,
+without money, d'ye see?  It's the most horrible thing in the world.
+It's like no candle in the darrk.  And I, ye know, I know I'd naver
+forgive annybody that took my money; and what'll Pole think of me?  For
+oh! ye may call riches temptation, but poverty's punishment; and I heard
+a young curate say that from the pulpit, and he was lean enough to know,
+poor fella!"
+
+Both Cornelia and Arabella breathed more freely when they had heard Mrs.
+Chump's tale to an end.  They knew perfectly well that she was blameless
+for the defection of Mr. Pericles, and understood from her exclamatory
+narrative that their father had reason to feel some grave alarm at the
+Greek's absence from their house, and had possibly reasons of his own for
+accusing Mrs. Chump, as he had done.  The ladies administered consolation
+to her, telling her that for their part they would never blame her; even
+consenting to be kissed by her, hugged by her, playfully patted,
+complimented, and again wept over.  They little knew what a fervour of
+secret devotion they created in Mrs. Chump's bosom by this astounding
+magnanimity displayed to her, who laboured under the charge of being the
+source of their ruin; nor could they guess that the little hypocrisy they
+were practising would lead to any singular and pregnant resolution in the
+mind of the woman, fraught with explosion to their house, and that quick
+movement which they awaited.
+
+Mrs. Chump, during the patient strain of a tender hug of Arabella, had
+mutely resolved in a great heat of gratitude that she would go to Mr.
+Pericles, and, since he was necessary to the well-being of Brookfield,
+bring him back, if she had to bring him back in her arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+[Georgiana Ford to Wilfrid:]
+
+"I have omitted replying to your first letter, not because of the nature
+of its contents: nor do I write now in answer to your second because of
+the permission you give me to lay it before my brother.  I cannot think
+that concealment is good, save for very base persons; and since you take
+the initiative in writing very openly, I will do so likewise.
+
+"It is true that Emilia is with me.  Her voice is lost, and she has
+fallen as low in spirit as one can fall and still give us hope of her
+recovery.  But that hope I have, and I am confident that you will not
+destroy it.  In the summer she goes with us to Italy.  We have consulted
+one doctor, who did not prescribe medicine for her.  In the morning she
+reads with my brother.  She seems to forget whatever she reads: the
+occupation is everything necessary just now.  Our sharp Monmouth air
+provokes her to walk briskly when she is out, and the exercise has once
+or twice given colour to her cheeks.  Yesterday being a day of clear
+frost, we drove to a point from which we could mount the Buckstone, and
+here, my brother says, the view appeared to give her something of her
+lost animation.  It was a look that I had never seen, and it soon went:
+but in the evening she asked me whether I prayed before sleeping, and
+when she retired to her bedroom, I remained there with her for a time.
+
+"You will pardon me for refusing to let her know that you have written to
+your relative in the Austrian service to obtain a commission for you.
+But, on the other hand, I have thought it right to tell her incidentally
+that you will be married in the Summer of this year.  I can only say that
+she listened quite calmly.
+
+"I beg that you will not blame yourself so vehemently.  By what you do,
+her friends may learn to know that you regret the strange effect produced
+by certain careless words, or conduct: but I cannot find that self-
+accusation is ever good at all.  In answer to your question, I may add
+that she has repeated nothing of what she said when we were together in
+Devon.
+
+"Our chief desire (for, as we love her, we may be directed by our
+instinct), in the attempt to restore her, is to make her understand that
+she is anything but worthless.  She has recently followed my brother's
+lead, and spoken of herself, but with a touch of scorn.  This morning,
+while the clear frosty sky continues, we were to have started for an old
+castle lying toward Wales; and I think the idea of a castle must have
+struck her imagination, and forced some internal contrast on her mind.  I
+am repeating my brother's suggestion--she seemed more than usually
+impressed with an idea that she was of no value to anybody.  She asked
+why she should go anywhere, and dropped into a chair, begging to be
+allowed to stay in a darkened room.  My brother has some strange
+intuition of her state of mind.  She has lost any power she may have had
+of grasping abstract ideas.  In what I conceived to be play, he told her
+that many would buy her even now.  She appeared to be speculating on
+this, and then wished to know how much those persons would consider her
+to be worth, and who they were.  Nor did it raise a smile on her face to
+hear my brother mention Jews, and name an absolute sum of money; but, on
+the contrary, after evidently thinking over it, she rose up, and said
+that she was ready to go.  I write fully to you, telling you these
+things, that you may see she is at any rate eager not to despair, and is
+learning, much as a child might learn it, that it need not be.
+
+"Believe me, that I will in every way help to dispossess your mind of the
+remorse now weighing upon you, as far as it shall be within my power to
+do so.
+
+"Mr. Runningbrook has been invited by my brother to come and be her
+companion.  They have a strong affection for one another.  He is a true
+poet, full of reverence for a true woman."
+
+
+[Wilfrid to Georgiana Ford:]
+
+"I cannot thank you enough.  When I think of her I am unmanned; and if I
+let my thoughts fall back upon myself, I am such as you saw me that night
+in Devon--helpless, and no very presentable figure.  But you do not
+picture her to me.  I cannot imagine whether her face has changed; and,
+pardon me, were I writing to you alone, I could have faith that the
+delicate insight and angelic nature of a woman would not condemn my
+desire to realize before my eyes the state she has fallen to.  I see her
+now under a black shroud.  Have her features changed?  I cannot remember
+one--only at an interval her eyes.  Does she look into the faces of
+people as she used?  Or does she stare carelessly away?  Softly between
+the eyes, is what I meant.  I mean--but my reason for this particularity
+is very simple.  I would state it to you, and to no other.  I cannot have
+peace till she is restored; and my prayer is, that I may not haunt her to
+defeat your labour.  Does her face appear to show that I am quite absent
+from her thoughts?  Oh! you will understand me.  You have seen me stand
+and betray no suffering when a shot at my forehead would have been mercy.
+To you I will dare to open my heart.  I wish to be certain that I have
+not injured her--that is all.  Perhaps I am more guilty than you think:
+more even than I can call to mind.  If I may fudge by the punishment, my
+guilt is immeasurable.  Tell me--if you will but tell me that the
+sacrifice of my life to her will restore her, it is hers.  Write, and say
+this, and I will come: Do not delay or spare me.  Her dumb voice is like
+a ghost in my ears.  It cries to me that I have killed it.  Be actuated
+by no charitable considerations in refraining to write.  Could a
+miniature of her be sent?  You will think the request strange; but I want
+to be sure she is not haggard--not the hospital face I fancy now, which
+accuses me of murder.  Does she preserve the glorious freshness she used
+to wear?  She had a look--or did you see her before the change?  I only
+want to know that she is well."
+
+
+[Tracy Runningbrook to Wilfrid:]
+
+"You had my promise that I would write and give your conscience a
+nightcap.  I have a splendid one for you.  Put it on without any
+hesitation.  I find her quite comfortable.  Powys reads Italian with her
+in the morning.  His sister (who might be a woman if she liked, but has
+an insane preference for celestial neutrality) does the moral
+inculcation.  The effect is comical.  I should like you to see Cold Steel
+leading Tame Fire about, and imagining the taming to be her work!  You
+deserve well of your generation.  You just did enough to set this darling
+girl alight.  Knights and squires numberless will thank you.  The idea of
+your reproaching yourself is monstrous.  Why, there's no one thanks you
+more than she does.  You stole her voice, which some may think a pity,
+but I don't, seeing that I would rather have her in a salon than before
+the footlights.  Imagine my glory in her!--she has become half cat!  She
+moves softly, as if she loved everything she touched; making you throb to
+feel the little ball of her foot.  Her eyes look steadily, like green
+jewels before the veil of an Egyptian temple.  Positively, her eyes have
+grown green--or greenish!  They were darkish hazel formerly, and talked
+more of milkmaids and chattering pastorals than a discerning master would
+have wished.  Take credit for the change; and at least I don't blame you
+for the tender hollows under the eyes, sloping outward, just hinted...
+Love's mark on her, so that men's hearts may faint to know that love is
+known to her, and burn to read her history.  When she is about to speak,
+the upper lids droop a very little; or else the under lids quiver upward-
+-I know not which.  Take further credit for her manner.  She has now a
+manner of her own.  Some of her naturalness has gone, but she has skipped
+clean over the 'young lady' stage; from raw girl she has really got as
+much of the great manner as a woman can have who is not an ostensibly
+retired dowager, or a matron on a pedestal shuffling the naked virtues
+and the decorous vices together.  She looks at you with an immense,
+marvellous gravity, before she replies to you--enveloping you in a velvet
+light.  This, is fact, not fine stuff, my dear fellow.  The light of her
+eyes does absolutely cling about you.  Adieu!  You are a great master,
+and know exactly when to make your bow and retire.  A little more, and
+you would have spoilt her.  Now she is perfect."
+
+
+[Wilfrid to Tracy Runningbrook:]
+
+"I have just come across a review of your last book, and send it,
+thinking you may wish to see it.  I have put a query to one of the
+passages, which I think misquoted: and there will be no necessity to call
+your attention to the critic's English.  You can afford to laugh at it,
+but I confess it puts your friends in a rage.  Here are a set of fellows
+who arm themselves with whips and stand in the public thoroughfare to
+make any man of real genius run the gauntlet down their ranks till he
+comes out flayed at the other extremity!  What constitutes their right to
+be there?--By the way, I met Sir Purcell Barrett (the fellow who was at
+Hillford), and he would like to write an article on you that should act
+as a sort of rejoinder.  Yon won't mind, of course--it's bread to him,
+poor devil!  I doubt whether I shall see you when you comeback, so write
+a jolly lot of letters.  Colonel Pierson, of the Austrian army, my uncle
+(did you meet him at Brookfield?), advises me to sell out immediately.
+He is getting me an Imperial commission--cavalry.  I shall give up the
+English service.  And if they want my medal, they can have it, and I'll
+begin again.  I'm sick of everything except a cigar and a good volume of
+poems.  Here's to light one, and now for the other!
+
+          "'Large eyes lit up by some imperial sin,'" etc.
+          (Ten lines from Tracy's book are here copied neatly.)
+
+
+[Tracy Runningbrook to Wilfrid:]
+
+"Why the deuce do you write me such infernal trash about the opinions of
+a villanous dog who can't even en a decent sentence?  I've been damning
+you for a white-livered Austrian up and down the house.  Let the fellow
+bark till he froths at the mouth, and scatters the virus of the beast
+among his filthy friends.  I am mad-dog proof.  The lines you quote were
+written in an awful hurry, coming up in the train from Richford one
+morning.  You have hit upon my worst with commendable sagacity.  If it
+will put money in Barren's pocket, let him write.  I should prefer to
+have nothing said.  The chances are all in favour of his writing like a
+fool.  If you're going to be an Austrian, we may have a chance of
+shooting one another some day, so here's my hand before you go and sell
+your soul; and anything I can do in the meantime--command me."
+
+
+[Georgiana Ford to Wilfrid:]
+
+"I do not dare to charge you with a breach of your pledged word.  Let me
+tell you simply that Emilia has become aware of your project to enter the
+Austrian service, and it has had the effect on her which I foresaw.  She
+could bear to hear of your marriage, but this is too much for her, and it
+breaks my heart to see her.  It is too cruel.  She does not betray any
+emotion, but I can see that every principle she had gained is gone, and
+that her bosom holds the shadows of a real despair.  I foresaw it, and
+sought to guard her against it.  That you, whom she had once called (to
+me) her lover, should enlist himself as an enemy, of her country!--it
+comes to her as a fact striking her brain dumb while she questions it,
+and the poor body has nothing to do but to ache.  Surely you could have
+no object in doing this?  I will not suspect it.  Mr. Runningbrook is
+acquainted with your plans, I believe; but he has no remembrance of
+having mentioned this one to Emilia.  He distinctly assures me that he
+has not done so,  and I trust him to speak truth.  How can it have
+happened?  But here is the evil done.  I see no remedy.  I am not skilled
+in sketching the portraits you desire of her, and yet, if you have ever
+wished her to know this miserable thing, it would be as well that you
+should see the different face that has come among us within twenty hours."
+
+
+[Wilfrid to Georgiana Ford:]
+
+"I will confine my reply to a simple denial of having caused this fatal
+intelligence to reach her ears; for the truth of which, I pledge my
+honour as a gentleman.  A second's thought would have told me--indeed I
+at once acquiesced in your view--that she should not know it.  How it has
+happened it is vain to attempt to guess.  Can you suppose that I desired
+her to hate me?  Yet this is what the knowledge of the step I am taking
+will make her do!  If I could see--if I might see her for five minutes, I
+should be able to explain everything, and, I sincerely think (painful as
+it would be to me), give her something like peace.  It is too late even
+to wish to justify myself; but her I can persuade that she--
+Do you not see that her mind is still unconvinced of my--I will call it
+baseness!  Is this the self-accusing you despise?  A little of it must be
+heard.  If I may see her I will not fail to make her understand my
+position.  She shall see that it is I who am worthless--not she!  You
+know the circumstances under which I last beheld her--when I saw pang
+upon pang smiting her breast from my silence!  But now I may speak.  Do
+not be prepossessed against my proposal!  It shall be only for five
+minutes--no more.  Not that it is my desire to come.  In truth, it could
+not be.  I have felt that I alone can cure her--I who did the harm.  Mark
+me: she will fret secretly--, but dear and kindest lady, do not smile too
+critically at the tone I adopt.  I cannot tell how I am writing or what
+saying.  Believe me that I am deeply and constantly sensible of your
+generosity.  In case you hesitate, I beg you to consult Mr. Powys."
+
+
+[Georgiana Ford to Wilfrid:]
+
+"I had no occasion to consult my brother to be certain that an interview
+between yourself and Emilia should not take place.  There can be no
+object, even if the five minutes of the meeting gave her happiness, why
+the wound of the long parting should be again opened.  She is wretched
+enough now, though her tenderness for us conceals it as far as possible.
+When some heavenly light shall have penetrated her, she will have a
+chance of peace.  The evil is not of a nature to be driven out by your
+hands.  If you are not going into the Austrian service, she shall know as
+much immediately.  Otherwise, be as dead to her as you may, and your
+noblest feelings cannot be shown under any form but that."
+
+
+[Wilfrid to Tracy Runningbrook:]
+
+"Some fellows whom I know want you to write a prologue to a play they are
+going to get up.  It's about Shakespeare--at least, the proceeds go to
+something of that sort.  Do, like a good fellow, toss us off twenty
+lines.  Why don't you write?  By the way, I hope there's no truth in a
+report that has somehow reached me, that they have the news down in
+Monmouth of my deserting to the black-yellow squadrons?  Of course, such
+a thing as that should have been kept from them.  I hear, too, that your-
+-I suppose I must call her now your--pupil is falling into bad health.
+Think me as cold and 'British' as you like; but the thought of this does
+really affect me painfully.  Upon my honour, it does!  'And now he
+yawns!' you're saying.  You're wrong.  We Army men feel just as you poets
+do, and for a longer time, I think, though perhaps not so acutely.  I
+send you the 'Venus' cameo which you admired.  Pray accept it from an old
+friend.  I mayn't see you again."
+
+
+[Tracy Runningbrook to Wilfrid:]
+(enclosing lines)
+
+"Here they are.  It will require a man who knows something about metre to
+speak them.  Had Shakespeare's grandmother three Christian names? and did
+she anticipate feminine posterity in her rank of life by saying
+habitually, 'Drat it?'  There is as yet no Society to pursue this
+investigation, but it should be started.  Enormous thanks for the Venus.
+I wore it this morning at breakfast.  Just as we were rising, I leaned
+forward to her, and she jumped up with her eyes under my chin.  'Isn't
+she a beauty?' I said.  'It was his,' she answered, changing eyes of
+eagle for eyes of dove, and then put out the lights.  I had half a mind
+to offer it, on the spot.  May I?  That is to say, if the impulse seizes
+me I take nobody's advice, and fair Venus certainly is not under my chin
+at this moment.  As to ill health, great mother Nature has given a house
+of iron to this soul of fire.  The windows may blaze, or the windows may
+be extinguished, but the house stands firm.  When you are lightning or
+earthquake, you may have something to reproach yourself for; as it is, be
+under no alarm.  Do not put words in my mouth that I have not uttered.
+'And now he yawns,' is what I shall say of you only when I am sure you
+have just heard a good thing.  You really are the best fellow of your set
+that I have come across, and the only one pretending to brains.  Your
+modesty in estimating your value as a leader of Pandours will be pleasing
+to them who like that modesty.  Good-bye.  This little Emilia is a marvel
+of flying moods.  Yesterday she went about as if she said, 'I've promised
+Apollo not to speak till to-morrow.'  To-day, she's in a feverish gabble
+--or began the day with a burst of it; and now she's soft and sensible.
+If you fancy a girl at her age being able to see, that it's a woman's
+duty to herself and the world to be artistic--to perfect the thing of
+beauty she is meant to be by nature!--and, seeing, too, that Love is an
+instrument like any other thing, and that we must play on it with
+considerate gentleness, and that tearing at it or dashing it to earth,
+making it howl and quiver, is madness, and not love!--I assure you she
+begins to see it!  She does see it.  She is going to wear a wreath of
+black briony (preserved and set by Miss Ford, a person cunning in these
+matters).  She's going to the ball at Penarvon Castle, and will look--
+supply your favourite slang word.  A little more experience, and she will
+have malice.  She wants nothing but that to make her consummate.  Malice
+is the barb of beauty.  She's just at present a trifle blunt.  She will
+knock over, but not transfix.  I am anxious to watch the effect she
+produces at Penarvon.  Poor little woman!  I paid a compliment to her
+eyes.  'I've got nothing else,' said she.  Dine as well as you can while
+you are in England.  German cookery is an education for the sentiment of
+hogs.  The play of sour and sweet, and crowning of the whole with fat,
+shows a people determined to go down in civilization, and try the
+business backwards.  Adieu, curst Croat!  On the Wallachian border mayst
+thou gather philosophy from meditation."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+Dexterously as Wilfrid has turned Tracy to his uses by means of the
+foregoing correspondence, in doing so he had exposed himself to the
+retributive poison administered by that cunning youth.  And now the
+Hippogriff seized him, and mounted with him into mid-air; not as when the
+idle boy Ganymede was caught up to act as cup-bearer in celestial Courts,
+but to plunge about on yielding vapours, with nothing near him save the
+voice of his desire.
+
+The Philosopher here peremptorily demands the pulpit.  We are subject, he
+says, to fantastic moods, and shall dry ready-minted phrases picture them
+forth?  As, for example, can the words  'delirium,' or 'frenzy,' convey
+an image of Wilfrid's state, when his heart began to covet Emilia again,
+and his sentiment not only interposed no obstacle, but trumpeted her
+charms and fawned for her, and he thought her lost, remembered that she
+had been his own, and was ready to do any madness to obtain her?
+'Madness' is the word that hits the mark, but it does not fully embrace
+the meaning.  To be in this state, says the Philosopher, is to be 'On The
+Hippogriff;' and to this, as he explains, the persons who travel to Love
+by the road of sentiment will come, if they have any stuff in them, and
+if the one who kindles them is mighty.  He distinguishes being on the
+Hippogriff from being possessed by passion.  Passion, he says, is noble
+strength on fire, and points to Emilia as a representation of passion.
+She asks for what she thinks she may have; she claims what she imagines
+to be her own.  She has no shame, and thus, believing in, she never
+violates, nature, and offends no law, wild as she may seem.  Passion does
+not turn on her and rend her when it is thwarted.  She was never carried
+out of the limit of her own intelligent force, seeing that it directed
+her always, with the simple mandate to seek that which belonged to her.
+She was perfectly sane, and constantly just to herself, until the failure
+of her voice, telling her that she was a beggar in the world, came as a
+second blow, and partly scared her reason.  Constantly just to herself,
+mind!  This is the quality of true passion.  Those who make a noise, and
+are not thus distinguishable, are on Hippogriff.
+
+--By which it is clear to me that my fantastic Philosopher means to
+indicate the lover mounted in this wise, as a creature bestriding an
+extraneous power.  "The sentimentalist," he says, "goes on accumulating
+images and hiving sensations, till such time as (if the stuff be in him)
+they assume a form of vitality, and hurry him headlong.  This is not
+passion, though it amazes men, and does the madder thing."
+
+In fine, it is Hippogriff.  And right loath am I to continue my
+partnership with a fellow who will not see things on the surface, and is,
+as a necessary consequence, blind to the fact that the public detest him.
+I mean, this garrulous, super-subtle, so-called Philosopher, who first
+set me upon the building of 'The Three Volumes,' it is true, but whose
+stipulation that he should occupy so large a portion of them has made
+them rock top-heavy, to the forfeit of their stability.  He maintains
+that a story should not always flow, or, at least, not to a given
+measure.  When we are knapsack on back, he says, we come to eminences
+where a survey of our journey past and in advance is desireable, as is a
+distinct pause in any business, here and there.  He points proudly to the
+fact that our people in this comedy move themselves,--are moved from
+their own impulsion,--and that no arbitrary hand has posted them to bring
+about any event and heap the catastrophe.  In vain I tell him that he is
+meantime making tatters of the puppets' golden robe illusion: that he is
+sucking the blood of their warm humanity out of them.  He promises that
+when Emilia is in Italy he will retire altogether; for there is a field
+of action, of battles and conspiracies, nerve and muscle, where life
+fights for plain issues, and he can but sum results.  Let us, he
+entreats, be true to time and place.  In our fat England, the gardener
+Time is playing all sorts of delicate freaks in the lines and traceries
+of the flower of life, and shall we not note them?  If we are to
+understand our species, and mark the progress of civilization at all, we
+must.  Thus the Philosopher.  Our partner is our master, and I submit,
+hopefully looking for release with my Emilia, in the day when Italy
+reddens the sky with the banners of a land revived.
+
+I hear Wilfrid singing out that he is aloft, burning to rush ahead, while
+his beast capers in one spot, abominably ludicrous.  This trick of
+Hippogriff is peculiar, viz., that when he loses all faith in himself, he
+sinks--in other words, goes to excesses of absurd humility to regain it.
+Passion has likewise its panting intervals, but does nothing so
+preposterous.  The wreath of black briony, spoken of by Tracy as the
+crown of Emilia's forehead, had begun to glow with a furnace-colour in
+Wilfrid's fancy.  It worked a Satanic distraction in him.  The girl sat
+before him swathed in a darkness, with the edges of the briony leaves
+shining deadly--radiant above--young Hecate!  The next instant he was
+bleeding with pity for her, aching with remorse, and again stung to
+intense jealousy of all who might behold her (amid a reserve of angry
+sensations at her present happiness).
+
+Why had she not made allowance for his miserable situation that night in
+Devon?  Why did she not comprehend his difficulties in relation to his
+father's affairs?  Why did she not know that he could not fail to love
+her for ever?
+
+Interrogations such as these were so many switches of the whip in the
+flanks of Hippogriff.
+
+Another peculiarity of the animal gifted with wings is, that around the
+height he soars to he can see no barriers nor any of the fences raised by
+men.  And here again he differs from Passion, which may tug against
+common sense but is never, in a great nature, divorced from it: In air on
+Hippogriff, desires wax boundless, obstacles are hidden.  It seemed
+nothing to Wilfrid (after several tremendous descents of humility) that
+he should hurry for Monmouth away, to gaze on Emilia under her fair,
+infernal, bewitching wreath; nothing that he should put an arm round her;
+nothing that he should forthwith carry her off, though he died for it.
+Forming no design beyond that of setting his eyes on her, he turned the
+head of Hippogriff due Westward.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV
+
+Penarvon castle lay over the borders of Monmouthshire.  Thither, on a
+night of frosty moonlight, troops of carriages were hurrying with the
+usual freightage for a country ball:--the squire who will not make
+himself happy by seeing that his duty to the softer side of his family
+must be performed during the comfortable hours when bachelors snooze in
+arm-chairs, and his nobler dame who, not caring for Port or tobacco,
+cheerfully accepts the order of things as bequeathed to her: the
+everlastingly half-satisfied young man, who looks forward to the hour
+when his cigar-light will shine; and the damsel thrice demure as a cover
+for her eagerness.  Within a certain distance of one of the carriages, a
+man rode on horseback.  The court of the castle was reached, and he
+turned aside, lingering to see whether he could get a view of the lighted
+steps.  To effect his object, he dismounted and led his horse through the
+gates, turning from gravel to sward, to keep in the dusk.  A very agile
+middle-aged gentleman was the first to appear under the portico-lamps,
+and he gave his hand to a girl of fifteen, and then to a most portly lady
+in a scarlet mantle.  The carriage-door slammed and drove off, while a
+groan issued from the silent spectator.  "Good heavens! have I followed
+these horrible people for five-and-twenty miles!"  Carriage after
+carriage rattled up to the steps, was disburdened of still more 'horrible
+people' to him, and went the way of the others.  "I shan't see her, after
+all," he cried hoarsely, and mounting, said to the beast that bore him,
+"Now go sharp."
+
+Whether you recognize the rider of Hippogriff or not, this is he; and the
+poor livery-stable screw stretched madly till wind failed, when he was
+allowed to choose his pace.  Wilfrid had come from London to have sight
+of Emilia in the black-briony wreath: to see her, himself unseen, and go.
+But he had not seen her; so he had the full excuse to continue the
+adventure.  He rode into a Welsh town, and engaged a fresh horse for the
+night.
+
+"She won't sing, at all events," thought Wilfrid, to comfort himself,
+before the memory that she could not, in any case, touched springs of
+weakness and pitying tenderness.  From an eminence to which he walked
+outside the town, Penarvon was plainly visible with all its lighted
+windows.
+
+"But I will pluck her from you!" he muttered, in a spasm of jealousy; the
+image of himself as an outcast against the world that held her, striking
+him with great force at that moment.
+
+"I must give up the Austrian commission, if she takes me."
+
+And be what?  For he had sold out of the English service, and was to
+receive the money in a couple of days.  How long would the money support
+him?  It would not pay half his debts!  What, then, did this pursuit of
+Emilia mean?  To blink this question, he had to give the spur to
+Hippogriff.  It meant (upon Hippogriff at a brisk gallop), that he
+intended to live for her, die for her, if need be, and carve out of the
+world all that she would require.  Everything appears possible, on
+Hippogriff, when he is going; but it is a bad business to put the spur on
+so willing a beast.  When he does not go of his own will;--when he sees
+that there are obstructions, it is best to jump off his back.  And we
+should abandon him then, save that having once tasted what he can do for
+us, we become enamoured of the habit of going keenly, and defying
+obstacles.  Thus do we begin to corrupt the uses of the gallant beast
+(for he is a gallant beast, though not of the first order); we spoil his
+instincts and train him to hurry us to perdition.
+
+"If my sisters could see me now!" thought Wilfrid, half-smitten with a
+distant notion of a singularity in his position there, the mark for a
+frosty breeze, while his eyes kept undeviating watch over Penarvon.
+
+After a time he went back to the inn, and got among coachmen and footmen,
+all battling lustily against the frost with weapons scientifically
+selected at the bar.  They thronged the passages, and lunged hearty
+punches at one another, drank and talked, and only noticed that a
+gentleman was in their midst when he moved to get a light.  One
+complained that he had to drive into Monmouth that night, by a road that
+sent him five miles out of his way, owing to a block--a great stone that
+had fallen from the hill.  "You can't ask 'em to get out and walk ten
+steps," he said; "or there!  I'd lead the horses and just tip up the off
+wheels, and round the place in a twinkle, pop 'm in again, and nobody
+hurt; but you can't ask ladies to risk catchin' colds for the sake of the
+poor horses."
+
+Several coachmen spoke upon this, and the shame and marvel it was that
+the stone had not been moved; and between them the name of Mr. Powys was
+mentioned, with the remark that he would spare his beasts if he could.
+
+"What's that block you're speaking of, just out of Monmouth?"  enquired
+Wilfrid; and it being described to him, together with the exact bearings
+of the road and situation of the mass of stone, he at once repeated a
+part of what he had heard in the form of the emphatic interrogation,
+"What! there?" and flatly told the coachman that the stone had been
+moved.
+
+"It wasn't moved this morning, then, sir," said the latter.
+
+"No; but a great deal can be done in a couple of hours," said Wilfrid.
+
+"Did you see 'em at work, sir?"
+
+"No; but I came that way, and the road was clear."
+
+"The deuce it was!" ejaculated the coachman, willingly convinced.
+
+"And that's the way I shall return," added Wilfrid.
+
+He tossed some money on the bar to aid in warming the assemblage, and
+received numerous salutes as he passed out.  His heart was beating fast.
+"I shall see her, in the teeth of my curst luck," he thought, picturing
+to himself the blessed spot where the mass of stone would lie; and to
+that point he galloped, concentrating all the light in his mind on this
+maddest of chances, till it looked sound, and finally certain.
+
+"It's certain, if that's not a hired coachman," he calculated.  "If he
+is, he won't risk his fee.  If he isn't, he'll feel on the safe side
+anyhow.  At any rate, it's my only chance."  And away he flew between
+glimmering slopes of frost to where a white curtain of mist hung across
+the wooded hills of the Wye.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI
+
+Emilia was in skilful hands, and against anything less powerful than a
+lover mounted upon Hippogriff, might have been shielded.  What is poison
+to most girls, Merthyr prescribed for her as medicine.  He nourished her
+fainting spirit upon vanity.  In silent astonishment Georgiana heard him
+address speeches to her such as dowagers who have seen their day can
+alone of womankind complacently swallow.  He encouraged Tracy
+Runningbrook to praise the face of which she had hitherto thought shyly.
+Jewels were placed at her disposal, and dresses laid out cunningly suited
+to her complexion.  She had a maid to wait on her, who gabbled at the
+momentous hours of robing and unrobing: "Oh, miss! of all the dark young
+ladies I ever see!"--Emilia was the most bewitching.  By-and-by, Emilia
+was led to think of herself; but with a struggle and under protest.  How
+could it be possible that she was so very nice to the eye, and Wilfrid
+had abandoned her?  The healthy spin of young new blood turned the wheels
+of her brain, and then she thought: "Perhaps I am really growing
+handsome?"  The maid said artfully of her hair: "If gentlemen could only
+see it down, miss!  It's the longest, and thickest, and blackest, I ever
+touched!"  And so saying, slid her fingers softly through it after the
+comb, and thrilled the owner of that hair till soft thoughts made her
+bosom heave, and then self-love began to be sensibly awakened, followed
+by self-pity, and some further form of what we understand as
+consciousness.  If partially a degradation of her nature, this saved her
+mind from true despair when it began to stir after the vital shock that
+had brought her to earth.  "To what purpose should I be fair?" was a
+question that did not yet come to her; but it was sweet to see Merthyr's
+eyes gather pleasure from the light of her own.  Sweet, though nothing
+more than coldly sweet.  She compared herself to her father's old broken
+violin, that might be mended to please the sight; but would never give
+the tones again.  Sometimes, if hope tormented her, she would strangle it
+by trying her voice: and such a little piece of self-inflicted anguish
+speedily undid all Merthyr's work.  He was patient as one who tends a
+flower in the Spring.  Georgiana marvelled that the most sensitive and
+proud of men should be striving to uproot an image from the heart of a
+simple girl, that he might place his own there.  His methods almost led
+her to think that his estimate of human nature was falling low.
+Nevertheless, she was constrained to admit that there was no diminution
+of his love for her, and it chastened her to think so.  "Would it be the
+same with me, if I--?" she half framed the sentence, blushing
+remorsefully while she denied that anything could change her great love
+for her brother.  She had caught a glimpse of Wilfrid's suppleness and
+selfishness.  Contrasting him with Merthyr, she was singularly smitten
+with shame, she knew not why.
+
+The anticipation of the ball at Penarvon Castle had kindled very little
+curiosity in Emilia's bosom.  She seemed to herself a machine; "one of
+the rest;" and looked more to see that she was still coveted by Merthyr's
+eyes than at the glitter of the humming saloons.  A touch of her old
+gladness made her smile when Captain Gambier unexpectedly appeared and
+walked across the dancers to sit beside her.  She asked him why he had
+come from London: to which he replied, with a most expressive gaze under
+her eyelids, that he had come for one object.  "To see me?"  thought
+Emilia, wondering, and reddening as she ceased to wonder.  She had
+thought as a child, and the neat instant felt as a woman.  He finished
+Merthyr's work for him.  Emilia now thought: "Then I must be worth
+something."  And with "I am," she ended her meditation, glowing.  He
+might have said that she had all beauty ever showered upon woman: she
+would have been led to believe him at that moment of her revival.
+
+Now, Lady Charlotte had written to Georgiana, telling her that Captain
+Gambier was soon to be expected in her neighbourhood, and adding that it
+would be as well if she looked closely after her charge.  When Georgiana
+saw him go over to Emilia she did not remember this warning: but when she
+perceived the sudden brilliancy and softness in Emilia's face after the
+first words had fallen on her ears, she grew alarmed, knowing his
+reputation, and executed some diversions, which separated them.  The
+captain made no effort to perplex her tactics, merely saying that he
+should call in a day or two.  Merthyr took to himself all the credit of
+the visible bloom that had come upon Emilia, and pacing with her between
+the dances, said: "Now you will come to Italy, I think."
+
+She paused before answering, "Now?" and feverishly continued: "Yes; at
+once.  I will go.  I have almost felt my voice again to-night."
+
+"That's well.  I shall write to Marini to-morrow.  You will soon find
+your voice if you will not fret for it.  Touch Italy!"
+
+"Yes; but you must be near me," said Emilia.
+
+Georgiana heard this, and could not conceive other than that Emilia was
+growing to be one of those cormorant creatures who feed alike on the
+homage of noble and ignoble.  She was critical, too, of that very assured
+pose of Emilia's head and firm planting of her feet as the girl paraded
+the room after the dances in which she could not join.  Previous to this
+evening, Georgiana had seen nothing of the sort in her; but, on the
+contrary, a doubtful droop of the shoulders and an unwilling gaze, as of
+a soul submerged in internal hesitations.  "I earnestly trust that this
+is a romantic folly of Merthyr's, and no more," thought Georgiana, who
+would have had that view concerning his love for Italy likewise, if
+recollection of her own share of adventure there had not softly
+interposed.
+
+Tracy, Georgiana, Merthyr, and Emilia were in the carriage, well muffled
+up, with one window open to the white mist.  Emilia was eager to thank
+her friend, if only for the physical relief from weariness and
+sluggishness which she was experiencing.  She knew certainly that the dim
+light of a recovering confidence in herself was owing, all, to him, and
+burned to thank him.  Once on the way their hands touched, and he felt a
+shy pressure from her fingers as they parted.  Presently the carriage
+stopped abruptly, and listening they heard the coachman indulge his
+companion outside with the remark that they were a couple of fools, and
+were now regularly 'dished.'
+
+"I don't see why that observation can't go on wheels," said Tracy.
+
+Merthyr put out his head, and saw the obstruction of the mass of stone
+across the road.  He alighted, and together with the footman, examined
+the place to see what the chance was of their getting the carriage past.
+After a space of waiting, Georgiana clutched the wraps about her throat
+and head, and impetuously followed her brother, as her habit had always
+been.  Emilia sat upright, saying, "I must go too."  Tracy moaned a
+petition to her to rest and be comfortable while the Gods were
+propitious.  He checked her with his arm, and tried to pacify her by
+giving a description of the scene.  The coachman remained on his seat.
+Merthyr, Georgiana, and the footman were on the other side of the rock,
+measuring the place to see whether, by a partial ascent of the sloping
+rubble down which it had bowled, the carriage might be got along.
+
+"Go; they have gone round; see whether we can give any help," said Emilia
+to Tracy, who cried: "My goodness! what help can we give?  This is an
+express situation where the Fates always appear in person and move us on.
+We're sure to be moved, if we show proper faith in them.  This is my
+attitude of invocation."  He curled his legs up on the seat, resting his
+head on an arm; but seeing Emilia preparing for a jump he started up, and
+immediately preceded her.  Emilia looked out after him.  She perceived a
+figure coming stealthily from the bank.  It stopped, and again advanced,
+and now ran swiftly down.  She drew back her head as it approached the
+open door of the carriage; but the next moment trembled forward, and was
+caught with a cat-like clutch upon Wilfrid's breast.
+
+"Emilia! my own for ever!  I swore to die this night it I did not see
+you!"
+
+"You love me, Wilfrid? love me?"
+
+"Come with me now!"
+
+"Now?"
+
+"Away! with me! your lover!"
+
+"Then you love me!
+
+"I love you!  Come!"
+
+"Now?  I cannot move."
+
+"I am out in the night without you."
+
+"Oh, my lover!  Oh, Wilfrid!"
+
+"Come to me!"
+
+"My feet are dead!"
+
+"It's too late!"
+
+A sturdy hulloa! sounding from the coachman made Merthyr's ears alive.
+When he returned he found Emilia huddled up on the seat, alone, her face
+in her hands, and the touch of her hands like fire.  He had to entreat
+her to descend, and in helping her to alight bore her whole weight, and
+supported her in a sad wonder, while the horses were led across the
+rubble, and the carriage was with difficulty, and some confusions, guided
+to clear its wheels of the obstructing mass.  Emilia persisted in saying
+that nothing ailed her; and to the coachman, who could have told him
+something, and was willing to have done so (notwithstanding a gold fee
+for silence that stuck in his palm), Merthyr put no question.
+
+As they were taking their seats in the carriage again, Georgiana said,
+"Where is your wreath, Sandra?"
+
+The black-briony wreath was no longer on her head.
+
+"Then, it wasn't a dream!" gasped Emilia, feeling at her temples.
+
+Georgiana at once fell into a scrutinizing coldness, and when Merthyr,
+who fancied the wreath might have fallen as he was lifting Emilia from
+the carriage, proposed to go and search the place for it, his sister laid
+her fingers on his arm, remarking, "You will not find it, dear;" and
+Emilia cried "Oh! no, no! it is not there;" and, with her hands pressed
+hard against her bosom, sat fixed and silent.
+
+Out of this mood she issued with looks of such tenderness that one who
+watched her, speculating on her character as Merthyr did, could see that
+in some mysterious way she had been, during the few minutes that
+separated them, illumined upon the matter nearest her heart.  Was it her
+own strength, inspired by some sublime force, that had sprung up suddenly
+to eject a worthless love?  So he hoped in despite of whispering reason,
+till Georgiana spoke to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII
+
+When the force of Wilfrid's embrace had died out from her body, Emilia
+conceived wilfully that she had seen an apparition, so strange, sudden,
+and wild had been his coming and going: but her whole body was a song to
+her.  "He is not false: he is true."  So dimly, however, was the 'he' now
+fashioned in her brain, and so like a thing of the air had he descended
+on her, that she almost conceived the abstract idea, 'Love is true,' and
+possibly, though her senses did not touch on it to shape it, she had the
+reflection in her: "After all, power is mine to bring him to my side."
+Almost it seemed to her that she had brought him from the grave.  She sat
+hugging herself in the carriage, hating to hear words, and seeing a ball
+of fire away in the white mist.  Georgiana looked at her no more; and
+when Tracy remarked that he had fancied having seen a fellow running up
+the bank, she said quietly, "Did you?"
+
+"Robert must have seen him, too," added Merthyr, and so the interloper
+was dismissed.
+
+On reaching home, no sooner were they in the hall than Emilia called for
+her bedroom candle in a thin, querulous voice that made Tracy shout with
+laughter and love of her quaintness.
+
+Emilia gave him her hand, and held up her mouth to kiss Georgiana, but no
+cheek was bent forward for the salute.  The girl passed from among them,
+and then Merthyr said to his sister: "What is the matter?"
+
+"Surely, Merthyr, you should not be at a loss," she answered, in a
+somewhat unusual tone, that was half irony.
+
+Merthyr studied her face.  Alone with her, he said: "I could almost
+suppose that she has seen this man."
+
+Georgiana smiled sadly.  "I have not seen him, dear; and she has not told
+me so."
+
+"You think it was so?"
+
+"I can imagine it just possible."
+
+"What! while we were out and had left her!  He must be mad!"
+
+"Not necessarily mad, unless to be without principle is to be mad."
+
+"Mad, or graduating for a Spanish comedie d'intrigue," said Merthyr.
+"What on earth can he mean by it?  If he must see her, let him come here.
+But to dog a carriage at midnight, and to prefer to act startling
+surprises!--one can't help thinking that he delights in being a stage-
+hero."
+
+Georgiana's: "If he looks on her as a stage-heroine?" was unheeded, and
+he pursued: "She must leave England at once," and stated certain
+arrangements that were immediately to be made.
+
+"You will not give up this task you have imposed on yourself?" she said.
+
+"To do what?"
+
+She could have answered: "To make this unsatisfactory creature love you;"
+but her words were, "To civilize this little savage."
+
+Merthyr was bright in a moment: "I don't give up till I see failure."
+
+"Is it not possible, dear, to be dangerously blind?" urged Georgiana.
+
+"Keep to the particular case," he returned; "and don't tempt me into your
+woman's snare of a generalization.  It's possible, of course, to be one-
+ideaed and obstinate.  But I have not yet seen your savage guilty of a
+deceit.  Her heart has been stirred, and her heart, as you may judge, has
+force enough to be constant, though none can deny that it has been
+roughly proved."
+
+"For which you like her better?" said Georgiana, herself brightening.
+
+"For which I like her better," he replied, and smiled, perfectly armed.
+
+"Oh! is it because I am a woman that I do not understand this sort of
+friendship?" cried Georgiana.  "And from you, Merthyr, to a girl such as
+she is!  Me she satisfies less and less.  You speak of force of heart, as
+if it were manifested in an abandonment of personal will."
+
+"No, my darling, but in the strong conception of a passion."
+
+"Yes; if she had discriminated, and fixed upon a worthy object!"
+
+"That," rejoined Merthyr, "is akin to the doctrine of justification by
+success."
+
+"You seek to foil me with sophisms," said Georgiana, warming.  "A woman--
+even a girl--should remember what is due to herself.  You are attracted
+by a passionate nature--I mean, men are."
+
+"The general instance," assented Merthyr.
+
+"Then, do you never reflect," pursued Georgiana, "on the composition and
+the elements of that sort of nature?  I have tried to think the best of
+it.  It seems to me still no, not contemptible at all--but selfishness is
+the groundwork of it; a brilliant selfishness, I admit.  I see that it
+shows its best feature, but is it the nobler for that?  I think, and I
+must think, that excellence is a point to be reached only by
+unselfishness, and that usefulness is the test of excellence."
+
+"Before there has been any trial of her?" asked Merthyr.  "Have you not
+been a little too eager to put the test to her?"
+
+Georgiana reluctantly consented to have her argument attached to a single
+person.  "She is not a child, Merthyr."
+
+"Ay; but she should bethought one."
+
+"I confess I am utterly at sea," Georgiana sighed.  "Will you at least
+allow that sordid selfishness does less mischief than this 'passion' you
+admire so much?"
+
+"I will allow that she may do herself more mischief than if she had the
+opposite vice of avarice--anything you will, of that complexion."
+
+"And why should she be regarded as a child?" asked Georgiana piteously.
+
+"Because, if she has outnumbered the years of a child, she is no further
+advanced than a child, owing to what she has to get rid of.  She is
+overburdened with sensations that set her head on fire.  Her solid, firm,
+and gentle heart keeps her balanced, so long as there is no one playing
+on it.  That a fool should be doing so, is scarcely her fault."
+
+Georgiana murmured to herself, "He is not a fool."  She said, "I do see a
+certain truth in what you say, dear Merthyr.  But I have been
+disappointed in her.  I have taken her among my poor.  She listens to
+their tales, without sympathy.  I took her into a sick-room.  She stood
+by a dying bed like a statue.  Her remark when we came into the air was,
+'Death seems easy, if it were not so stifling!'  Herself always! herself
+the centre of what she sees and feels!  And again, she has no active
+desire to do good to any mortal thing.  A passive wish that everybody
+should be happy, I know she has.  Few have not.  She would give money if
+she had it.  But this is among the mysteries of Providence to me, that
+one no indifferent to others should be gifted with so inexplicable a
+power of attraction."
+
+Merthyr put this case to her: "Suppose you saw any of the poor souls you
+wait on lying sick with fever, would it be just to describe the character
+of one so situated as fretful, ungrateful, of rambling tongue, poor in
+health, and generally of loose condition of mind?"
+
+"There, again, is that foreign doctrine which exults in the meanest
+triumphs by getting the thesis granted that we are animal--only animals!"
+Georgiana burst out.  You argue that at this season and at that season
+she is helpless.  If she is a human creature, must she not have a mind to
+cover those conditions?"
+
+"And a mind," Merthyr took her up, "specially experienced, armed, and
+alert to be a safeguard to her at the most critical period of her life!
+Oh, yes!  Whether she 'must' have it is one thing; but no one can content
+the value of such a jewel to any young person."
+
+Georgiana stood silenced; and knew later that she had been silenced by a
+fallacy.  For, is youth the most critical period of life?  Neither
+brother nor sister, however, were talking absolutely for the argument.
+Beneath this dialogue, the current in her mind pressed to elicit some
+avowal of his personal feeling for the girl, toward whom Georgiana's
+disposition was kindlier than her words might lead one to think.  He, on
+the other hand, talked with the distinct object of  disguising his
+feelings under a tone of moderate friendship for Emilia, that was capable
+of excusing her.  A sensitive man of thirty odd years does not loudly
+proclaim his appreciation of a girl under twenty: moreover, Merthyr
+wished to spare his sister.
+
+He thought of questioning Robert, the coachman, whether anyone had
+visited the carriage during his five minutes' absence from it: but
+Merthyr's peculiar Welsh delicacy kept him from doing that, hard as it
+was to remain in doubt and endure the little poisoned shafts of a
+suspicion.
+
+In the morning there was a letter from Marini on the breakfast-table.
+Merthyr glanced down the contents.  His countenance flashed with a
+marvellous light.  "Where is she?" he said, looking keenly for Emilia.
+
+Emilia came in from the garden.
+
+"Now, my Sandra!" cried Merthyr, waving the letter to her; "can you pack
+up, to start in an hour?  There's work coming on for us, and I shall be a
+boy again, and not the drumstick I am in this country.  I have a letter
+from Marini.  All Lombardy is prepared to rise, and this time the
+business will be done.  Marini is off for Genoa.  Under the orange-trees,
+my Sandra! and looking on the bay, singing of Italy free!"
+
+Emilia fell back a step, eyeing him with a grave expression of wonder, as
+if she beheld another being from the one she had hitherto known.  The
+calm Englishman had given place to a volcanic spirit.
+
+"Isn't that the sketch we made?" he resumed.  "The plot's perfect.  I
+detest conspiracies, but we must use what weapons we can, and be Old
+Mole, if they trample us in the earth.  Once up, we have Turin to back
+us.  This I know.  We shall have nothing but the Tedeschi to manage: and
+if they beat us in cavalry, it's certain that they can't rely on their
+light horse.  The Magyars would break in a charge.  We know that they
+will.  As for the rest:--
+
+         'Soldati settentrionali,
+          Come sarebbe Boemi a Croati,'
+
+we area match for them!  Artillery we shall get.  The Piedmontese are mad
+for the signal.  Come; sit and eat.  The air seems dead down in this
+quiet country; we're out of the stream.  I must rush up to London to
+breathe and then we won't lose a moment.  We shall be in Italy in four
+days.  Four days, my Sandra!  And Italy going to be free; Georgey, I'm
+fasting.  And you will see all your old friends.  All?  Good God!  No!--
+not all!  Their blood shall nerve us.  The Austrian thinks he wastes us
+by slaughter.  With every dead man he doubles the life of the living!  Am
+I talking like a foreigner, Sandra mia?  My child, you don't eat!  And I,
+who dreamed last night that I looked out over Novara from the height of
+the Col di Colma, and saw the plain under a red shadow from a huge
+eagle!"
+
+Merthyr laughed, swinging round his arm.  Emilia continued staring at him
+as at a man transformed, while Georgiana asked: "May Marini's letter be
+seen?"  Her visage had become firm and set in proportion as her brother's
+excitement increased.
+
+"Eat, my Sandra! eat!" called Merthyr, who was himself eating with a
+campaigning appetite.
+
+Georgiana laid down the letter folded under Merthyr's fingers, keeping
+her hand on it till he grew alive to her meaning, that it should be put
+away.
+
+"Marini is vague about artillery," she murmured.
+
+"Vague!" echoed Merthyr.  "Say prudent.  If he said we could lay hands on
+fifty pieces, then distrust him!"
+
+"God grant that this be not another pit for further fruitless bloodshed!"
+was the interjection standing in Georgiana's eyes, and then she dropped
+them pensively, while Merthyr recounted the patient schemes that had led
+to this hour, the unuttered anxieties and the bursting hopes.
+
+Still Emilia kept her distressfully unenthusiastic looks turned from one
+to the other, though her Italy was the theme.  She did not eat, but had
+dropped one hand flat on her plate, looking almost idiotic.  She heard of
+Italy as of a distant place, known to her in ancient years.  Merthyr's
+transformation, too, helped some form of illusion in her brain that she
+was cut off from any kindred feeling with other people.
+
+As soon as he had finished, Merthyr jumped up; and coming round to
+Emilia, touched her shoulder affectionately, saying: "Now!  There won't
+be much packing to do.  We shall be in London to-night in time for your
+mother to pass the evening with you."
+
+Emilia rose straightway, and her eyes fell vacantly on Georgiana for
+help, as far as they could express anything.
+
+Georgiana gave no response, save a look well nigh as vacant in the
+interchange.
+
+"But you haven't eaten at all!" said Merthyr.
+
+Emilia shook her head.  "No."
+
+"Eat, my Sandra! to please me!  You will need all your strength if you
+would be a match for Georgey anywhere where there's action."
+
+"Yes!" Emilia traversed his words with a sudden outcry.  "Yes, I will go
+to London.  I am ready to go to London now."
+
+It was clear that a new light had fallen on her intelligence.
+
+Merthyr was satisfied to see her sit down to the table, and he at once
+went out to issue directions for the first step in the new and momentous
+expedition.
+
+Emilia put the bread to her mouth, and crumbled it on a dry lip: but it
+was evident to Georgiana, hostile witness as she was, that Emilia's mind
+was gradually warming to what Merthyr had said, and that a picture was
+passing before the girl.  She perceived also a thing that no misery of
+her own had yet drawn from Emilia.  It was a tear that fell heavily on
+the back of her hand.  Soon the tears came in quick succession, while the
+girl tried to eat, and bit at salted morsels.  It was a strange sight for
+Georgiana, this statuesque weeping, that got human bit by bit, till the
+bosom heaved long sobs: and yet no turn of the head for sympathy; nothing
+but passionless shedding of big tear-drops!
+
+She went to the girl, and put her hand upon her; kissed her, and then
+said: "We have no time to lose.  My brother never delays when he has come
+to a resolve."
+
+Emilia tried to articulate: "I am ready."
+
+"But you have not eaten!"
+
+Emilia made a mechanical effort to eat.
+
+"Remember," said Georgiana, "we have a long distance to go.  You will
+want your strength.  You would not be a burden to him?  Eat, while I get
+your things ready."  And Georgiana left her, secretly elated to feel that
+in this expedition it was she, and she alone, who was Merthyr's mate.
+What storm it was, and what conflict, agitated the girl and stupefied
+her, she cared not to guess, now that she had the suitable designation,
+'savage,' confirmed in all her acts, to apply to her.
+
+When Tracy Runningbrook came down at his ordinary hour of noon to
+breakfast, he found a twisted note from Georgiana, telling him that
+important matters had summoned Merthyr to London, and that they were all
+to be seen at Lady Gosstre's town-house.
+
+"I believe, by Jove!  Powys manoeuvres to get her away from me," he
+shouted, and sat down to his breakfast and his book with a comforted
+mind.  It was not Georgiana to whom he alluded; but the appearance of
+Captain Gambier, and the pronounced discomposure visible in the handsome
+face of the captain on his hearing of the departure, led Tracy to think
+that Georgiana's was properly deplored by another, though that other was
+said to be engaged.   'On revient toujours,' he hummed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII
+
+Three days passed as a running dream to Emilia.  During that period she
+might have been hurried off to Italy without uttering a remonstrance.
+Merthyr's spirited talk of the country she called her own; of its heroic
+youth banded to rise, and sworn to liberate it or die; of good historic
+names borne by men, his comrades, in old campaigning adventures; and
+stories and incidents of those past days--all given with his changed
+face, and changed ringing voice, almost moved her to plunge forgetfully
+into this new tumultuous stream while the picture of the beloved land,
+lying shrouded beneath the perilous star it was about to follow grew in
+her mind.
+
+"Shall I go with the Army?" she asked Georgiana.
+
+"No, my child; you will simply go to school," was the cold reply.
+
+"To school!"  Emilia throbbed, "while they are fighting!"
+
+"To the Academy.  My brother's first thought is to further your progress
+in Art.  When your artistic education is complete, you will choose your
+own course."
+
+"He knows, he knows that I have no voice!"  Emilia struck her lap with
+twisted fingers.  "My voice is thick in my throat.  If I am not to march
+with him, I can't go; I will not go.  I want to see the fight.  You have.
+Why should I keep away?  Could I run up notes, even if I had any voice,
+while he is in the cannon-smoke?"
+
+"While he is in the cannon-smoke!" Georgiana revolved the line
+thoughtfully.  "You are aware that my brother looks forward to the
+recovery of your voice," she said.
+
+"My voice is like a dead serpent in my throat," rejoined Emilia.  "My
+voice!  I have forgotten music.  I lived for that, once; now I live for
+nothing, only to take my chance everywhere with my friend.  I want to
+smell powder.  My father says it is like salt, the taste of blood, and is
+like wine when you smell it.  I have heard him shout for it.  I will go
+to Italy, if I may go where my friend Merthyr goes; but nothing can keep
+me shut up now.  My head's a wilderness when I'm in houses.  I can
+scarcely bear to hear this London noise, without going out and walking
+till I drop."
+
+Coming to a knot in her meditation, Georgiana concluded that Emilia's
+heart was warming to Merthyr.  She was speedily doubtful again.
+
+These two delicate Welsh natures, as exacting as they were delicate, were
+little pleased with Emilia's silence concerning her intercourse with
+Wilfrid.  Merthyr, who had expressed in her defence what could be said
+for her, was unwittingly cherishing what could be thought in her
+disfavour.  Neither of them hit on the true cause, which lay in
+Georgiana's coldness to her.  One little pressure of her hand, carelessly
+given, made Merthyr better aware of the nature he was dealing with.  He
+was telling her that a further delay might keep them in London for a
+week; and that he had sent for her mother to come to her.
+
+"I must see my mother," she had said, excitedly.  The extension of the
+period named for quitting England made it more imminent m her imagination
+than when it was a matter of hours.  "I must see her."
+
+"I have sent for her," said Merthyr, and then pressed Emilia's hand.  But
+she who, without having brooded on complaints of its absence, thirsted
+for demonstrative kindness, clung to the hand, drawing it, doubled,
+against her chin.
+
+"That is not the reason," she said, raising her full eyes up at him over
+the unrelinquished hand.  "I love the poor Madre; let her come; but I
+have no heart for her just now.  I have seen Wilfrid."
+
+She took a tighter hold of his fingers, as fearing he might shrink from
+her.  Merthyr hated mysteries, so he said, "I supposed it must have been
+so--that night of our return from Penarvon?"
+
+"Yes," she murmured, while she read his face for a shadow of a repulsion;
+"and, my friend, I cannot go to Italy now!"
+
+Merthyr immediately drew a seat beside her.  He perceived that there
+would be no access to her reason, even as he was on the point of
+addressing it.
+
+"Then all my care and trouble are to be thrown away?" he said, taking the
+short road to her feelings.
+
+She put the hand that was disengaged softly on his shoulder.  "No; not
+thrown away.  Let me be what Merthyr wishes me to be! That is my chief
+prayer."
+
+"Why, then, will you not do what Merthyr wishes you to do?"
+
+Emilia's eyelids shut, while her face still fronted him.
+
+"Oh! I will speak all out to you," she cried.  "Merthyr, my friend, he
+came to kiss me once, before I have only just understood it!  He is going
+to Austria.  He came to touch me for the last time before his hand is red
+with my blood.  Stop him from going!  I am ready to follow you:--I can
+hear of his marrying that woman:--Oh! I cannot live and think of him in
+that Austrian white coat.  Poor thing!--my dear! my dear!"  And she
+turned away her head.
+
+It is not unnatural that Merthyr hearing these soft epithets, should
+disbelieve in the implied self-conquest of her preceding words.  He had
+no clue to make him guess that these were simply old exclamations of hers
+brought to her lips by the sorrowful contrast in her mind.
+
+"It will be better that you should see him," he said, with less of his
+natural sincerity; so soon are we corrupted by any suspicion that our
+egoism prompts.
+
+"Here?"  And she hung close to him, open-lipped, open-eyed, open-eared,
+as if (Georgiana would think it, thought Merthyr) her savage senses had
+laid the trap for this proposal, and now sprung up keen for their prey.
+"Here, Merthyr?  Yes! let me see him.  You will!  Let me see him, for he
+cannot resist me.  He tries.  He thinks he does: but he cannot.  I can
+stretch out my finger--I can put it on the day when, if he has galloped
+one way he will gallop another.  Let him come."
+
+She held up both her hands in petition, half dropping her eyelids, with a
+shadowy beauty.
+
+In Merthyr's present view, the idea of Wilfrid being in ranks opposed to
+him was so little provocative of intense dissatisfaction, that it was out
+of his power to believe that Emilia craved to see him simply to dissuade
+the man from the obnoxious step.  "Ah, well!  See him; see him, if you
+must," he said.  "Arrange it with my sister."
+
+He quitted the room, shrinking from the sound of her thanks, and still
+more from the consciousness of his torment.
+
+The business that detained him was to get money for Marini.  Georgiana
+placed her fortune at his disposal a second time.  There was his own,
+which he deemed it no excess of chivalry to fling into the gulf.  The two
+sat together, arranging what property should be sold, and how they would
+share the sacrifice in common.  Georgiana pressed him to dispose of a
+little estate belonging to her, that money might immediately be raised.
+They talked as they sat over the fire toward the dusk of the winter
+evening.
+
+"You would not have refused me once, Merthyr!"
+
+"When you were a child, and I hardly better than a boy.  Now it's
+different.  Let mine go first, Georgey.  You may have a husband, who will
+not look on these things as we do."
+
+"How can I love a husband!" was all she said; and Merthyr took her in his
+arms.  His gaiety had gone.
+
+"We can't go dancing into a pit of this sort," he sighed, partly to
+baffle the scrutiny he apprehended in her silence.  "The garrison at
+Milan is doubled, and I hear they are marching troops through Tyrol.
+Some alerte has been given, and probably some traitors exist.  One
+wouldn't like to be shot like a dog!  You haven't forgotten poor Tarani?
+I heard yesterday of the girl who calls herself his widow."
+
+"They were betrothed, and she is!" exclaimed Georgiana.
+
+"Well, there's a case of a man who had two loves--a woman and his
+country; and both true to him!"
+
+"And is he so singular, Merthyr?"
+
+"No, my best! my sweetest! my heart's rest! no!"
+
+They exchanged tender smiles.
+
+"Tarani's bride--beloved! you can listen to such matters--she has
+undertaken her task.  Who imposed it?  I confess I faint at the thought
+of things so sad and shameful.  But I dare not sit in judgement on a
+people suffering as they are.  Outrage upon outrage they have endured,
+and that deadens--or rather makes their heroism unscrupulous.  Tarani's
+bride is one of the few fair girls of Italy.  We have a lock of her hair.
+She shore it close the morning her lover was shot, and wore the thin
+white skull-cap you remember, until it was whispered to her that her
+beauty must serve."
+
+"I have the lock now in my desk," said Georgiana, beginning to tremble.
+"Do you wish to look at it?"
+
+"Yes; fetch it, my darling."
+
+He sat eyeing the firelight till she returned, and then taking the long
+golden lock in his handy he squeezed it, full of bitter memories and
+sorrowfulness.
+
+"Giulietta?" breathed his sister.
+
+"I would put my life on the truth of that woman's love.  Well!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"She abandons herself to the commandant of the citadel."
+
+A low outcry burst from Georgiana.  She fell at Merthyr's knees sobbing
+violently.  He let her sob.  In the end she struggled to speak.
+
+"Oh! can it be permitted?  Oh! can we not save her?  Oh, poor soul! my
+sister!  Is she blind to her lover in heaven?"
+
+Georgiana's face was dyed with shame.
+
+"We must put these things by," said Merthyr.  "Go to Emilia presently,
+and tell her--settle with her as you think fitting, how she shall see
+this Wilfrid Pole.  I have promised her she shall have her wish."
+
+Coloured by the emotion she was burning from, these words smote Georgiana
+with a mournful compassion for Merthyr.
+
+He had risen, and by that she knew that nothing could be said to alter
+his will.
+
+A sentimental pair likewise, if you please; but these were
+sentimentalists who served an active deity; and not that arbitrary
+protection of a subtle selfishness which rules the fairer portion of our
+fat England.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX
+
+
+"My brother tells me it is your wish to see Mr. Wilfrid Pole."
+
+Emilia's "Yes" came faintly in answer to Georgiana's cold accents.
+
+"Have you considered what you are doing in expressing such a desire?"
+
+Another "Yes" was heard from under an uplifted head:--a culprit
+affirmative, whereat the just take fire.
+
+"Be honest, Emilia.  Seek counsel and guidance to-night, as you have done
+before with me, and profited, I think.  If I write to bid him come, what
+will it mean?"
+
+"Nothing more," breathed Emilia.
+
+"To him--for in his way he seems to care for you fitfully--it will mean--
+stop! hear me.  The words you speak will have no part of the meaning,
+even if you restrain your tongue.  To him it will imply that his power
+over you is unaltered.  I suppose that the task of making you perceive
+the effect it really will have on you is hopeless."
+
+"I have seen him, and I know," said Emilia, in a corresponding tone.
+
+"You saw him that night of our return from Penarvon?  Judge of him by
+that.  He would not spare you.  To gratify I know not what wildness in
+his nature, he did not hesitate to open your old wound.  And to what
+purpose?  A freak of passion!"
+
+"He could not help it.  I told him he would come, and he came."
+
+"This, possibly, you call love; do you not?"
+
+Emilia was about to utter a plain affirmative, but it was checked.  The
+novelty of the idea of its not being love arrested her imagination.
+
+"If he comes to you here," resumed Georgiana--
+
+"He must come!" cried Emilia.
+
+"My brother has sanctioned it, so his coming or not will rest with him.
+If he comes, let me know the good that you think will result from an
+interview?  Ah! you have not weighed that question.  Do so;--or you give
+no heed to it?  In any ease, try to look into your own breast.  You were
+not born to live unworthily.  You can be, or will be, if you follow your
+better star, self-denying and noble.  Do you not love your country?
+Judge of this love by that.  Your love, if you have this power over him,
+is merely a madness to him; and his--what has it done for you?  If he
+comes, and this begins again, there will be a similar if not the same
+destiny for you."
+
+Emilia panted in her reply.  "No; it will not begin again."  She threw
+out both arms, shaking her head.  "It cannot, I know.  What am I now?  It
+is what I was that he loves.  He will not know what I am till he sees me.
+And I know that I have done things that he cannot forgive.  You have
+forgiven it, and Merthyr, because he is my friend; but I am sure Wilfrid
+will not.  He might pardon the poor 'me,' but not his Emilia!  I shall
+have to tell him what I did; so" (and she came closer to Georgiana)
+"there is some pain for me in seeing him."
+
+Georgiana was not proof against this simplicity of speech, backed by a
+little dying dimple, which seemed a continuation of the plain sadness of
+Emilia's tone.
+
+She said, "My poor child!" almost fondly, and then Emilia looked in her
+face, murmuring, "You sometimes doubt me."
+
+"Not your truth, but the accuracy of your perceptions and your knowledge
+of your real designs.  You are certainly deceiving yourself at this
+instant.  In the first place, the relation of that madness--no, poor
+child, not wickedness--but if you tell it to him, it is a wilful and
+unnecessary self-abasement.  If he is to be your husband, unburden your
+heart at once.  Otherwise, why?  why?  You are but working up a scene,
+provoking needless excesses: you are storing misery in retrospect, or
+wretchedness to be endured.  Had you the habit of prayer!  By degrees it
+will give you the thirst for purity, and that makes you a fountain of
+prayer, in whom these blind deceits cannot hide."
+
+Georgiana paused emphatically; as when, by our unrolling out of our
+ideas, we have more thoroughly convinced ourselves.
+
+"You pray to heaven," said Emilia, and then faltered, and blushed.  "I
+must be loved!" she cried.  "Will you not put your arms round me?"
+
+Georgiana drew her to her bosom, bidding her continue.  Emilia lay
+whispering under her chin.  "You pray, and you wish to be seen as you
+are, do you not?  You do.  Well, if you knew what love is, you would see
+it is the same.  You wish him to see and know you: you wish to be sure
+that he loves nothing but exactly you; it must be yourself.  You are
+jealous of his loving an idea of you that is not you.  You think, 'He
+will wake up and find his mistake;' or you think, 'That kiss was not
+intended for me; not for me as I am.'  Those are tortures!"
+
+Her discipline had transformed her, when she could utter such sentiments
+as these!
+
+Feeling her shudder, and not knowing how imagination forestalls
+experience in passionate blood, Georgiana said, "You speak like one who
+has undergone them.  But now at least you have thrown off the mask.  You
+love him still, this man!  And with as little strength of will!  Do you
+not see impiety in the comparison you have made?"
+
+"Oh! what I see is, that I wish I could say to him, 'Look on me, for I
+need not be ashamed--I am like Miss Ford!'"
+
+The young lady's cheeks took fire, and the clear path of speech becoming
+confused in her head she said, "Miss Ford?"
+
+"Georgiana," said Emilia, and feeling that her friend's cold manner had
+melted; "Georgey! my beloved! my darling in Italy, where will we go!  I
+envy no woman but you who have seen my dear ones fight.  You and I, and
+Merthyr!  Nothing but Austrian shot shall part us."
+
+"And so we make up a pretty dream!" interjected Georgiana.  "The Austrian
+shot, I think, will be fired by one who is now in the Austrian service,
+or who will soon be."
+
+"Wilfrid?" Emilia called out.  "No; that is what I am going to stop.  Why
+did I not tell you so at first?  But I never know what I say or do when I
+am with you, and everything seems chance.  I want to see him to prevent
+him from doing that.  I can."
+
+"Why should you?" asked Georgiana; and one to whom the faces of the two
+had been displayed at that moment would have pronounced them a hostile
+couple.
+
+"Why should I prevent him?" Emilia doled out the question slowly, and
+gave herself no further thought of replying to it.
+
+Apparently Georgiana understood the significance of this odd silence: she
+was perhaps touched by it.  She said, "You feel that you have a power
+over him.  You wish to exercise it.  Never mind wherefore.  If you do--if
+you try, and succeed--if, by the aid of this love presupposed to exist,
+you win him to what you require of him--do you honestly think the love is
+then immediately to be dropped?"
+
+Emilia meditated.  She caught up her voice hastily.  "I think so.  Yes.
+I hope so.  I mean it to be."
+
+"With a noble lover, Emilia.  Not with a selfish one.  In showing him the
+belief you have in your power over him, you betray that he has power over
+you.  And it is to no object.  His family, his position, his prospects--
+all tell you that he cannot marry you if he would.  And he is, besides,
+engaged--"
+
+"Let her suffer!"  Emilia's eyes flashed.
+
+"Ah!" and Georgiana thought, "Have I come upon your nature at last?"
+
+However it might be, Emilia was determined to show it.
+
+"She took my lover from me, and I say, let her suffer!  I would not hurt
+her myself--I would not lay my finger on her: but she has eyes like blue
+stones, and such a mouth!--I think the Austrian executioner has one like
+it.  If she suffers, and goes all dark as I did, she will show a better
+face.  Let her keep my lover.  He is not mine, but he was; and she took
+him from me.  That woman cannot feed on him as I did.  I know she has no
+hunger for love.  He will look at those blue bits of ice, and think of
+me.  I told him so.  Did I not tell him that in Devon?  I saw her eyelids
+move as fast as I spoke.  I think I look on Winter when I see her lips.
+Poor, wretched Wilfrid!"
+
+Emilia half-sobbed this exclamation out.  "I don't wish to hurt either of
+them," she added, with a smile of such abrupt opposition to her words
+that Georgiana was in perplexity.  A lady who has assumed the office of
+lecturer, will, in such a frame of mind, lecture on, if merely to
+vindicate to herself her own preconceptions.  Georgiana laid her finger
+severely upon Wilfrid's manifest faults; and, in fine, she spoke a great
+deal of the common sense that the situation demanded.  Nevertheless,
+Emilia held to her scheme.  But, in the meantime, Georgiana had seen more
+clearly into the girl's heart; and she had been won, also, by a natural
+gracefulness that she now perceived in her, and which led her to think,
+"Is Merthyr again to show me that he never errs in his judgement?"  An
+unaccountable movement of tenderness to Emilia made her drop a few kisses
+on her forehead.  Emilia shut her eyes, waiting for more.  Then she
+looked up, and said, "Have you felt this love for me very long?" at which
+the puny flame, scarce visible, sprang up, and warmed to a great heat.
+
+"My own Emilia!  Sandra! listen to me: promise me not to seek this
+interview."
+
+"Will you always love me as much?" Emilia bargained.
+
+"Yes, yes; I never vary.  It is my love for you that begs you."
+
+Emilia fell into a chair and propped her head behind both hands, tapping
+the floor briskly with her feet.  Georgiana watched the conflict going
+on.  To decide it promptly, she said: "And not only shall I love you
+thrice as well, but my brother Merthyr, whom you call your friend--he
+will--he cannot love you better; but he will feel you to be worthy the
+best love he can give.  There is a heart, you simple girl!  He loves you,
+and has never shown any of the pain your conduct has given him.  When I
+say he loves you, I tell you his one weakness--the only one I have
+discovered.  And judge whether, he has shown want of self-control while
+you were dying for another.  Did he attempt to thwart you?  No; to
+strengthen you; and never once to turn your attention to himself.  That
+is love.  Now, think of what anguish you have made him pass through: and
+think whether you have ever witnessed an alteration of kindness in his
+face toward you.  Even now, when he had the hope that you were cured of
+your foolish fruitless affection for a man who merely played with you,
+and cannot give up the habit, even now he hides what he feels--"
+
+So far Emilia let her speak without interruption; but gradually awakening
+to the meaning of the words:--
+
+"For me?" she cried.
+
+"Yes; for you."
+
+"The same sort of love as Wilfrid feels?"
+
+"By no means the same sort; but the love of man for woman."
+
+"And he saw me when I was that wretched heap?  And he knows everything!
+and loves me.  He has never kissed me."
+
+"Does that miserable test--?"  Georgiana was asking.
+
+"Pardon, pardon," said Emilia penitently; "I know that is almost nothing,
+now.  I am not a child.  I spoke from a sudden feeling.  For if he loves
+me, how--!  Oh, Merthyr! what a little creature I seem.  I cannot
+understand it.  I lose a brother.  And he was such a certainty to me.
+What did he love--what did he love, that night he found me on the pier?
+I looked like a creature picked off a mud-bank.  I felt like a worm, and
+miserably abandoned, I was a shameful sight.  Oh! how can I look on
+Merthyr's face again?"
+
+In these interjections Georgiana did not observe the proper humility and
+abject gratitude of a young person who had heard that she was selected by
+a prince of the earth.  A sort of 'Eastern handmaid' prostration, with
+joined hands, and, above all things, a closed mouth, the lady desired.
+She half regretted the revelation she had made; and to be sure at once
+that she had reaped some practical good, she said: "I need scarce ask you
+whether you have come to a right decision upon that other question."
+
+"To see Wilfrid?" said Emilia.  She appeared to pause musingly, and then
+turned to Georgiana, showing happy features; "Yes: I shall see him.  I
+must see him.  Let him know he is to come immediately."
+
+"That is your decision."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"After what I have told you?"
+
+"Oh, yes; yes!  Write the letter."
+
+Georgiana chid at an internal wrath that struggled to win her lips.
+"Promise me simply that what I have told you of my brother, you will
+consider yourself bound to keep secret.  You will not speak of it to
+others, nor to him."
+
+Emilia gave the promise, but with the thought; "To him?--will not he
+speak of it?"
+
+"So, then, I am to write this letter?" said Georgiana.
+
+"Do, do; at once!"  Emilia put on her sweetest look to plead for it.
+
+"Decidedly the wisest of men are fools in this matter," Georgiana's
+reflection swam upon her anger.
+
+"And dearest! my Georgey!" Emilia insisted on being blunt to the outward
+indications to which she was commonly so sensitive and reflective; "my
+Georgey! let me be alone this evening in my bedroom.  The little Madre
+comes, and--and I haven't the habit of being respectful to her.  And, I
+must be alone!  Do not send up for me, whoever wishes it."
+
+Georgiana could not stop her tongue: "Not if Mr. Wilfrid Pole--?"
+
+"Oh, he! I will see him," said Emilia; and Georgiana went from her
+straightway.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Active despair is a passion that must be superseded
+But love for a parent is not merely duty
+Had Shakespeare's grandmother three Christian names?
+Littlenesses of which women are accused
+Love discerns unerringly what is and what is not duty
+Our partner is our master
+Passion, he says, is noble strength on fire
+Silence was their only protection to the Nice Feelings
+The dismally-lighted city wore a look of Judgement terrible to see
+The sentimentalist goes on accumulating images
+True love excludes no natural duty
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Sandra Belloni, v6
+by George Meredith
+