Sandra Belloni (originally Emilia in England). Complete

“You mean—?” quoth Arabella.

“Here’s the driest stick that aver stood without sap.”

Arabella flushed when she took the implication that she was looking on the man as a husband. Adela heard the remarks, and flushed likewise. Mrs. Chump eyed them both. “It’s for the money o’ the man,” she soliloquized aloud, as her fashion was. Adela jumped up, and with an easy sprightly posture of her fair, commonly studious person, and natural run of notes “Oh!” she cried, “I begin to feel what it is to be like a live fish on the fire, frying, frying, frying! and if he can keep his Christian sentiments under this infliction, what a wonderful hero he must be! What a hot day!”

She moved swiftly to the door, and flung it open. A sight met her eyes at which she lost her self-possession. She started back, uttering a soft cry.

“Ah! aha! oh!” went the bitter ironic drawl of Mr. Pericles, whose sharp glance had caught the scene as well.

Emilia came forward with a face like sunset. Diplomacy, under the form of Wilfrid Pole, kicked its heels behind, and said a word or two in a tone of false cheerfulness.

“Oh! so!” Mr. Pericles frowned, while Emilia held her hand out to him. “Yeas! You are quite well? H’m! You are burnt like a bean—hein? I shall ask you what you have been doing, by and by.”

Happily for decency, Mrs. Chump had not participated in the fact presented by ocular demonstration. She turned about comfortably to greet Wilfrid, uttering the inspired remark: “Ye look red from a sly kiss!”

“For one?” said he, sharpening his blunted wits on this dull instrument.

The ladies talked down their talk. Then Wilfrid and Mr. Pericles interchanged quasi bows.

“Oh, if he doesn’t show his upper teeth like an angry cat, or a leopard I’ve seen!” cried Mrs. Chump in Adela’s ear, designating Mr. Pericles. “Does he know Mr. Wilfrud’s in the British army, and a new lieuten’t, gazetted and all?”

Mr. Pericles certainly did not look pleasantly upon Wilfrid: Emilia received his unconcealed wrath and spite.

“Go and sing a note!” he said.

“At the piano?” Emilia quietly asked.

“At piano, harp, what you will—it is ze voice I want.”

Emilia pitched her note high from a full chest and with glad bright eyes, which her fair critics thought just one degree brazen, after the revelation in the doorway.

Mr. Pericles listened; wearing an aching expression, as if he were sending one eye to look up into his brain for a judgement disputed in that sovereign seat.

Still she held on, and then gave a tremulous, rich, contralto note.

“Oh! the human voice!” cried Adela, overcome by the transition of tones.

“Like going from the nightingale to the nightjar,” said Arabella.

Mrs. Chump remarked: “Ye’ll not find a more susceptible woman to musuc than me.”

Wilfrid looked away. Pride coursed through his veins in a torrent.

When the voice was still, Mr. Pericles remained in a pondering posture.

“You go to play fool with zat voice in Milano, you are flogged,” he cried terribly, shaking his forefinger.

Wilfrid faced round in wrath, but Mr. Pericles would not meet his challenge, continuing: “You hear? you hear?—so!” and Mr. Pericles brought the palms of his hands in collision.

“Marcy, man!” Mrs. Chump leaped from her chair; “d’ye mean that those horrud forr’ners’ll smack a full-grown young woman?—Don’t go to ‘m, my dear. Now, take my ‘dvice, little Belloni, and don’t go. It isn’t the sting o’ the smack, ye know—”

“Shall I sing anything to you?” Emilia addressed Mr. Pericles. The latter shrugged to express indifference. Nevertheless she sang. She had never sung better. Mr. Pericles clutched his chin in one hand, elbow on knee. The ladies sighed to think of the loss of homage occasioned by the fact of so few being present to hear her. Wilfrid knew himself the fountain of it all, and stood fountain-like, in a shower of secret adulation: a really happy fellow. This: that his beloved should be the centre of eyes, and pronounced exquisite by general approbation, besides subjecting him to a personal spell: this was what he wanted. It was mournful to think that Circumstance had not at the same time created the girl of noble birth, or with an instinct for spiritual elegance. But the world is imperfect.

Presently he became aware that she was understood to be singing pointedly to him: upon which he dismissed the council of his sensations, and began to diplomatize cleverly. Leaning over to Adela, he whispered:

“Pericles wants her to go to Italy. My belief is, that she won’t.”

“And why?” returned Adela, archly reproachful.

“Well, we’ve been spoiling her a little, perhaps. I mean, we men, of course. But, I really don’t think that I’m chiefly to blame. You won’t allow Captain Gambier to be in fault, I know.”

“Why not?” said Adela.

“Well, if you will, then he is the principal offender.”

Adela acted disbelief; but, unprepared for her brother’s perfectly feminine audacity of dissimulation, she thought: “He can’t be in earnest about the girl,” and was led to fancy that Gambier might, and to determine to see whether it was so.

By this manoeuvre, Wilfrid prepared for himself a defender when the charge was brought against him.

Mr. Pericles was thunderstruck on hearing Emilia refuse to go to Italy. A scene of tragic denunciation on the one hand, and stubborn decision on the other, ensued.

“I shall not mind zis” (he spoke of Love and the awakening of the female heart) “not when you are trained. It is good, zen, and you have fire from it. But, now! little fool, I say, it is too airly—too airly! How shall you learn—eh? with your brain upon a man? And your voice, little fool, a thing of caprice, zat comes and goes as he will, not you will. Hein? like a barrel-organ, which he turns ze handle.—Mon Dieu! Why did I leave her?” Mr. Pericles struck his brow with his wrist, clutching at the long thin slice of hair that did greasy duty for the departed crop on his poll. “Did I not know it was a woman? And so you are, what you say, in lofe.”

Emilia replied: “I have not said so,” with exasperating coolness.

“You have your eye on a man. And I know him, zat man! When he is tired of you—whiff, away you go, a puff of smoke! And you zat I should make a Queen of Opera! A Queen? You shall have more rule zan twenty Queens—forty! See” (Mr. Pericles made his hand go like an aspen-leaf from his uplifted wrist); “So you shall set ze hearts of sossands! To dream of you, to adore you! and flowers, flowers everywhere, on your head, at your feet. You choose your lofer from ze world. A husband, if it is your taste. Bose, if you please. Zen, I say, you shall, you shall lofe a man. Let him tease and sting—ah! it will be magnifique: Aha! ze voice will sharpen, go deep; yeas! to be a tale of blood. Lofe till you could stab yourself:—Brava! But now? Little fool, I say!”

Emilia believed that she was verily forfeiting an empire. Her face wore a soft look of delight. This renunciation of a splendid destiny for Wilfrid’s sake, seemed to make her worthier of him, and as Mr. Pericles unrolled the list of her rejected treasures, her bosom heaved without a regret.

“Ha!” Mr. Pericles flung away from her: “go and be a little gutter-girl!”

The musical connoisseur drew on his own disappointment alone for eloquence. Had he been thinking of her, he might have touched cunningly on her love for Italy. Music was the passion of the man; and a millionaire’s passion is something that can make a stir. He knew that in Emilia he had discovered a pearl of song rarely to be found, and his object was to polish and perfect her at all cost: perhaps, as a secondary and far removed consideration, to point to her as a thing belonging to him, for which Emperors might envy him. The thought of losing her drove him into fits of rage. He took the ladies one by one, and treated them each to a horrible scene of gesticulation and outraged English. H accused their brother of conduct which they were obliged to throw (by a process of their own) into the region of Fine Shades, before they dared venture to comprehend him. Gross facts in relationship with the voice, this grievous “machine, not man,”—as they said—stated to them, harshly, impetuously. The ladies felt that he had bored their ears with hot iron pins. Adela tried laughter as a defence from his suggestion against Wilfrid, but had shortly afterwards to fly from the fearful anatomist. She served her brother thoroughly in the Council of Three; so that Mr. Pericles was led by them to trust that there had; been mere fooling in his absence, and that the emotions he looked to as the triumphant reserve in Emilia’s bosom, to be aroused at some crisis when she was before the world, slumbered still. She, on her part, contrasting her own burning sensations with this quaint, innocent devotion to Art and passion for music, felt in a manner guilty; and whenever he stormed with additional violence, she became suppliant, and seemed to bend and have regrets. Mr. Pericles would then say, with mollified irritability: “You will come to Italy to-morrow?—Ze day after?—not at all?” The last was given with a roar, for lack of her immediate response. Emilia would find a tear on her eyelids at times. Surround herself as she might with her illusions, she had no resting-place in Wilfrid’s heart, and knew it. She knew it as the young know that they are to die on a future day, without feeling the sadness of it, but with a dimly prevalent idea that this life is therefore incomplete. And again her blood, as with a wave of rich emotion, washed out the blank spot. She thought: “What can he want but my love?” And thus she satisfied her own hungry questioning by seeming to supply an answer to his.

The ladies of Brookfield by no means encouraged Emilia to refuse the generous offer of Mr. Pericles. They thought, too, that she might—might she? Oh! certainly she might go to Italy under his protection. “Would you let one of your blood?” asked Wilfrid brutally. With some cunning he led them to admit that Emilia’s parents should rightly be consulted in such a case.

One day Mr. Pericles said to the ladies: “I shall give a fete: a party monstre. In ze air: on grass. I beg you to invite friends of yours.”

Before the excogitation of this splendid resolve, he had been observed to wear for some period a conspiratorial aspect. When it was delivered, and Arabella had undertaken the management of the “party monstre”—(which was to be on Besworth Lawn, and, as it was not their own party, could be conducted with a sort of quasi-contemptuous superiority to incongruous gatherings)—this being settled, the forehead of Mr. Pericles cleared and he ceased to persecute Emilia.

“I am not one that is wopped,” he said significantly; nodding to his English hearers, as if this piece of shrewd acquaintance with the expressive mysteries of their language placed them upon equal terms.

It was really ‘a providential thing’ (as devout people phrase it) that Laura Tinley and Mabel Copley should call shortly after this, and invite the ladies to a proposed picnic of theirs on Besworth Lawn. On Besworth Lawn, of all places! and they used the word ‘picnic.’

“A word suggestive of gnawed drumstick and ginger-beer bottles.” Adela quoted some scapegoat of her acquaintance, as her way was when she wished to be pungent without incurring the cold sisterly eye of reproof for a vulgarism.

Both Laura and Mabel, when they heard of the mighty entertainment fixed for Besworth Lawn by Mr. Pericles, looked down. They were invited, and looked up. There was the usual amount of fencing with the combative Laura, who gave ground at all points, and as she was separating, said (so sweetly!) “Of course you have heard of the arrest of your—what does one call him?—friend?—or a French word?”

“You mean?” quoth Arabella.