Part 62 (1/2)
”Yes, I like the rhymes; but when you use words--I mean, if you are in earnest--how can you count and have stops, and--no, I do not care anything for poetry.”
Sir Purcell's opinion of Emilia, though he liked her, was, that if a genius, she was an incomplete one; and his positive judgement (which I set down in phrase that would have startled him) ranked both her and Tracy as a pair of partial humbugs, entertaining enough. They were both too real for him.
Haply at that moment the girl was intensely susceptible, for she chilled by his side; and when he left her she begged Madame to walk fast. ”I wonder whether I have a cold!” she said.
Madame explained all the signs of it with tragic minuteness, deciding that Emilia was free at present, and by miracle, from this English scourge; but Emilia kept her hands at her mouth. Over the hornbeam hedge of the lane that ran through the market-gardens, she could see a murky sunset spreading its deep-coloured lines, that seemed to her really like a great sorrowing over earth. It had never seemed so till now; and, entering the house, the roar of vehicles in a neighbouring road sounded like something implacable in the order of things among us, and clung about her ears pitilessly. Running upstairs, she tried a scale of notes that broke on a cough. ”Did I cough purposely?” she asked herself; but she had not the courage to try the notes again. While dressing she hummed a pa.s.sage, and sought stealthily to pa.s.s the barrier of her own watchfulness by dwelling on a deep note, from which she was to rise bursting with full bravura energy, and so forth on a tide of song. But her breath failed. She stared into the gla.s.s and forced the note. A panic caught at her heart when she heard the sound that issued. ”Am I ill? I must be hungry!” she exclaimed. ”It is a cough! But I don't cough! What is the matter with me?”
Under these auspices she forced her voice again, and subsequently loosened her dress, complaining of the dressmaker's affection for tightness. ”Now,” she said, having fallen upon an attempt at simple ”do, re, me, fa,” and laughed at herself. Was it the laugh, that stopping her at ”si,” made that ”si” so husky, asthmatic, like the wheezing of a crooked old witch? ”I am unlucky, to-night,” said Emilia. Or, rather, so said her surface-self. The submerged self--self in the depths--rarely speaks to the occasions, but lies under calamity quietly apprehending all; willing that the talker overhead should deceive others, and herself likewise, if possible. Emilia found her hands acting daintily and critically in the attirement of her person; and then surprised herself murmuring: ”I forgot that Tracy won't be here to-night.” By which she betrayed that she had divined those arts she was to s.h.i.+ne in, according to Tracy; and betrayed that she had a terrible fear of a loss of all else. It pained her now that Tracy should not be coming. ”Can I send for him?” she thought, as she looked winningly into the gla.s.s, trying to feel what sort of a feeling it was to be in love with a face like that one fronting her, so familiar in its aspects, so strange when scrutinized studiously! She drew a chair, and laying her elbow on the toilet-table, gazed hard, until the thought: ”What face did Wilfrid see last?” (meaning, ”when he saw me last”) drove her away.
Not only did she know herself now a face of many faces; but the life within her likewise as a soul of many souls. The one Emilia, so unquestioning, so sure, lay dead; and a dozen new spirits, with but a dim likeness to her, were fighting for possession of her frame, now occupying it alone, now in couples; and each casting grim reflections on the other. Which is only a way of telling you that the great result of mortal suffering--consciousness--had fully set in; to ripen; perhaps to debase; at any rate, to prove her.
To be of worth was still her fixed idea--all that was clear in the thickening mist. ”I cannot be ugly,” she said, and reproved herself for simulating a childish tone. ”Why do I talk in that way? I know I am not ugly. But if a fire scorched my face? There is nothing that seems safe!”
The love of friends was suggested to her as something to rely on; and the loving them. ”But if I have nothing to give!” said Emilia, and opened both her empty hands. She had diverted her mind from the pressure upon it, by this colloquy with a looking-gla.s.s, and gave herself a great rapture by running up notes to this theme:--
”No, no, no, no, no!--nothing! nothing!”
Clear, full, sonant notes; the notes of her true voice. She did not attempt them a second time; nor, when Sir Purcell requested her to sing in the course of the evening, did she comply. ”The Signora thinks I have a cold,” she said. Madame Marini protested that she hoped not, she even thought not, though none could avoid it at this season in this climate, and she turned to Sir Purcell to pet.i.tion for any receipts he might have in his possession, specifics for warding off the frightful affliction of households in England.
”I have now twenty,” said Madame, and throwing up her eyes; ”I have tried all! oh! so many lozenge!”
Marini and Emilia laughed. While Sir Purcell was maintaining the fact of his total ignorance of the subject against Madame's incredulity, Emilia left the room. When she came back Madame was pressing her visitor to be explicit with regard to a certain process of cure conducted by an application of cold water. The Neapolitan gave several shudders as she marked him attentively. ”Water cold!” she murmured with the deepest pathos, and dropped her face in her hands with narrowed shoulders.
Emilia held a letter over to Sir Purcell. He took it, first a.s.suring himself that Marini was in complicity with them. To Marini Emilia addressed a Momus forefinger, and Marini shrugged, smiling. ”Water cold!” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Madame, showing her countenance again. ”In winter!
Luigi, they are mad!” Marini poked the fire briskly, for his sensations entirely sided with his wife.
The letter Sir Purcell held contained these words:
”Be kind, and meet me to-morrow at ten in the morning, at that place where you first saw me sitting. I want you to take me to one who will help me. I cannot lose time any more. I must work. I have been dead for I cannot say how long. I know you will come.
”I am, for ever,
”Your thankful friend,
”Emilia.”
CHAPTER x.x.xIX
The pride of punctuality brought Sir Purcell to that appointed seat in the gardens about a minute in advance of Emilia. She came hurrying up to him with three fingers over her lips. The morning was cold; frost edged the flat brown chestnut and beech leaves lying about on rimy gra.s.s; so at first he made no remark on her evident unwillingness to open her mouth, but a feverish look of her eyes touched him with some kindly alarm for her.
”You should not have come out, if you think you are in any danger,” he said.
”Not if we walk fast,” she replied, in a visibly-controlled excitement.
”It will be over in an hour. This way.”
She led the marvelling gentleman toward the row, and across it under the big black elms, begging him to walk faster. To accommodate her, he suggested, that if they had any distance to go, they might ride, and after a short calculating hesitation, she consented, letting him know that she would tell him on what expedition she was bound whilst they were riding. The accompaniment of the wheels, however, necessitated a higher pitch of her voice, which apparently caused her to suffer from a contraction of the throat, for she remained silent, with a discouraged aspect, her full brown eyes showing as in a sombre meditation beneath the thick brows. The direction had been given to the City. On they went with the torrent, and were presently engulfed in fog. The roar grew m.u.f.fled, phantoms poured along the pavement, yellow beamless lights were in the shop-windows, all the vehicles went at a slow march.
”It looks as if Business were attending its own obsequies,” said Sir Purcell, whose spirits were enlivened by an atmosphere that confirmed his impression of things.
Emilia cried twice: ”Oh! what cruel weather!” Her eyelids blinked, either with anger or in misery.