Sandra Belloni (originally Emilia in England). Complete

“On your honour?”

These reiterated questions were simply pretexts for steps nearer to the answering lips.

“And I may see you?” he went on.

“Yes.”

“Wherever you are staying? And sometimes alone? Alone!—”

“Not if you do not know that I am to be respected,” said Emilia, huddled in the passionate fold of his arms. He released her instantly, and was departing, wounded; but his heart counselled wiser proceedings.

“To know that you are in England, breathing the same air with me, near me! is enough. Since we are to meet on those terms, let it be so. Let me only see you till some lucky shot puts me out of your way.”

This ‘some lucky shot,’ which is commonly pointed at themselves by the sentimental lovers, with the object of hitting the very centre of the hearts of obdurate damsels, glanced off Emilia’s, which was beginning to throb with a comprehension of all that was involved in the word she had given.

“I have your promise?” he repeated: and she bent her head.

“Not,” he resumed, taking jealousy to counsel, now that he had advanced a step: “Not that I would detain you against your will! I can’t expect to make such a figure at the end of the piece as your Count Branciani—who, by the way, served his friends oddly, however well he may have served his country.”

“His friends?” She frowned.

“Did he not betray the conspirators? He handed in names, now and then.”

“Oh!” she cried, “you understand us no better than an Austrian. He handed in names—yes he was obliged to lull suspicion. Two or three of the least implicated volunteered to be betrayed by him; they went and confessed, and put the Government on a wrong track. Count Branciani made a dish of traitors—not true men—to satisfy the Austrian ogre. No one knew the head of the plot till that night of the spy. Do you not see?—he weeded the conspiracy!”

“Poor fellow!” Wilfrid answered, with a contracted mouth: “I pity him for being cut off from his handsome wife.”

“I pity her for having to live,” said Emilia.

And so their duett dropped to a finish. He liked her phrase better than his own, and being denied any privileges, and feeling stupefied by a position which both enticed and stung him, he remarked that he presumed he must not detain her any longer; whereupon she gave him her hand. He clutched the ready hand reproachfully.

“Good-bye,” said she.

“You are the first to say it,” he complained.

“Will you write to that Austrian colonel, your cousin, to say ‘Never! never!’ to-morrow, Wilfrid?”

“While you are in England, I shall stay, be sure of that.”

She bade him give her love to all Brookfield.

“Once you had none to give but what I let you take back for the purpose!” he said. “Farewell! I shall see the harp to-night. It stands in the old place. I will not have it moved or touched till you—”

“Ah! how kind you were, Wilfrid!”

“And how lovely you are!”

There was no struggle to preserve the backs of her fingers from his lips, and, as this time his phrase was not palpably obscured by the one it countered, artistic sentiment permitted him to go.

CHAPTER LIII

A minute after his parting with Emilia, Wilfrid swung round in the street and walked back at great strides. “What a fool I was not to see that she was acting indifference!” he cried. “Let me have two seconds with her!” But how that was to be contrived his diplomatic brain refused to say. “And what a stiff, formal fellow I was all the time!” He considered that he had not uttered a sentence in any way pointed to touch her heart. “She must think I am still determined to marry that woman.”

Wilfrid had taken his stand on the opposite side of the street, and beheld a male figure in the dusk, that went up to the house and then stood back scanning the windows. Wounded by his audacious irreverence toward the walls behind which his beloved was sheltered, Wilfrid crossed and stared at the intruder. It proved to be Braintop.

“How do you do, sir!—no! that can’t be the house,” stammered Braintop, with a very earnest scrutiny.

“What house? what do you want?” enquired Wilfrid.

“Jenkinson,” was the name that won the honour of rescuing Braintop from this dilemma.

“No; it is Lady Gosstre’s house: Miss Belloni is living there; and stop: you know her. Just wait, and take in two or three words from me, and notice particularly how she is looking, and the dress she wears. You can say—say that Mrs. Chump sent you to enquire after Miss Belloni’s health.”

Wilfrid tore a leaf from his pocket-book, and wrote:

“I can be free to-morrow. One word! I shall expect it, with your name in full.”

But even in the red heat of passion his born diplomacy withheld his own signature. It was not difficult to override Braintop’s scruples about presenting himself, and Wilfrid paced a sentinel measure awaiting the reply. “Free to-morrow,” he repeated, with a glance at his watch under a lamp: and thus he soliloquized: “What a time that fellow is! Yes, I can be free to-morrow if I will. I wonder what the deuce Gambier had to do in Monmouthshire. If he has been playing with my sister’s reputation, he shall have short shrift. That fellow Braintop sees her now—my little Emilia! my bird! She won’t have changed her dress till she has dined. If she changes it before she goes out—by Jove, if she wears it to-night before all those people, that’ll mean ‘Good-bye’ to me: ‘Addio, caro,’ as those olive women say, with their damned cold languor, when they have given you up. She’s not one of them! Good God! she came into the room looking like a little Empress. I’ll swear her hand trembled when I went, though! My sisters shall see her in that dress. She must have a clever lady’s maid to have done that knot to her back hair. She’s getting as full of art as any of them—Oh! lovely little darling! And when she smiles and holds out her hand! What is it—what is it about her? Her upper lip isn’t perfectly cut, there’s some fault with her nose, but I never saw such a mouth, or such a face. ‘Free to-morrow?’ Good God! she’ll think I mean I’m free to take a walk!”

At this view of the ghastly shortcoming of his letter as regards distinctness, and the prosaic misinterpretation it was open to, Wilfrid called his inventive wits to aid, and ran swiftly to the end of the street. He had become—as like unto a lunatic as resemblance can approach identity. Commanding the length of the pavement for an instant, to be sure that no Braintop was in sight, he ran down a lateral street, but the stationer’s shop he was in search of beamed nowhere visible for him, and he returned at the same pace to experience despair at the thought that he might have missed Braintop issuing forth, for whom he scoured the immediate neighbourhood, and overhauled not a few quiet gentlemen of all ages. “An envelope!” That was the object of his desire, and for that he wooed a damsel passing jauntily with a jug in her hand, first telling her that he knew her name was Mary, at which singular piece of divination she betrayed much natural astonishment. But a fine round silver coin and an urgent request for an envelope, told her as plainly as a blank confession that this was a lover. She informed him that she lived three streets off, where there were shops. “Well, then,” said Wilfrid, “bring me the envelope here, and you’ll have another opportunity of looking down the area.”

“Think of yourself,” replied she, saucily; but proved a diligent messenger. Then Wilfrid wrote on a fresh slip:

“When I said ‘Free,’ I meant free in heart and without a single chain to keep me from you. From any moment that you please, I am free. This is written in the dark.”

He closed the envelope, and wrote Emilia’s name and the address as black as his pencil could achieve it, and with a smart double-knock he deposited the missive in the box. From his station opposite he guessed the instant when it was taken out, and from that judged when she would be reading it. Or perhaps she would not read it till she was alone? “That must be her bedroom,” he said, looking for a light in one of the upper windows; but the voice of a fellow who went by with: “I should keep that to myself, if I was you,” warned him to be more discreet.

“Well, here I am. I can’t leave the street,” quoth Wilfrid, to the stock of philosophy at his disposal. He burned with rage to think of how he might be exhibiting himself before Powys and his sister.

It was half-past nine when a carriage drove up to the door. Into this Mr. Powys presently handed Georgiana and Emilia. Braintop followed the ladies, and then the coachman received his instructions and drove away. Forthwith Wilfrid started in pursuit. He calculated that if his wind held till he could jump into a light cab, his legitimate prey Braintop might be caught. For, “they can’t be taking him to any party with them!” he chose to think, and it was a fair calculation that they were simply conducting Braintop part of his way home. The run was pretty swift. Wilfrid’s blood was fired by the pace, until, forgetting the traitor Braintop, up rose Truth from the bottom of the well in him, and he felt that his sole desire was to see Emilia once more—but once! that night. Running hard, in the midst of obstacles, and with eye and mind fined on one object, disasters befell him. He knocked apples off a stall, and heard vehement hallooing behind: he came into collision with a gentleman of middle age courting digestion as he walked from his trusty dinner at home to his rubber at the Club: finally he rushed full tilt against a pot-boy who was bringing all his pots broadside to the flow of the street. “By Jove! is this what they drink?” he gasped, and dabbed with his handkerchief at the beer-splashes, breathlessly hailing the looked-for cab, and, with hot brow and straightened-out forefinger, telling the driver to keep that carriage in sight. The pot-boy had to be satisfied on his master’s account, and then on his own, and away shot Wilfrid, wet with beer from throat to knee—to his chief protesting sense, nothing but an exhalation of beer! “Is this what they drink?” he groaned, thinking lamentably of the tastes of the populace. All idea of going near Emilia was now abandoned. An outward application of beer quenched his frenzy. She seemed as an unattainable star seen from the depths of foul pits. “Stop!” he cried from the window.

“Here we are, sir,” said the cabman.

The carriage had drawn up, and a footman’s alarum awakened one of the houses. The wretched cabman had likewise drawn up right under the windows of the carriage. Wilfrid could have pulled the trigger of a pistol at his forehead that moment. He saw that Miss Ford had recognized him, and he at once bowed elegantly. She dropped the window, and said, “You are in evening dress, I think; we will take you in with us.”

Wilfrid hoped eagerly he might be allowed to hand them to the door, and made three skips across the mire. Emilia had her hands gathered away from the chances of seizure. In wild rage he began protesting that he could not possibly enter, when Georgiana said, “I wish to speak to you,” and put feminine pressure upon him. He was almost on the verge of the word “beer,” by way of despairing explanation, when the door closed behind him.

“Permit me to say a word to your recent companion. He is my father’s clerk. I had to see him on urgent business; that is why I took this liberty,” he said, and retreated.

Braintop was still there, quietly posted, performing upon his head with a pocket hair-brush.

Wilfrid put Braintop’s back to the light, and said, “Is my shirt soiled?”

After a short inspection, Braintop pronounced that it was, “just a little.”

“Do you smell anything?” said Wilfrid, and hung with frightful suspense on the verdict. “A fellow upset beer on me.”

“It is beer!” sniffed Braintop.