George Meredith
Sandra Belloni (originally Emilia in England). Complete
Lady Gosstre grew presently aware that there was more acrimony in Freshfield Sumner’s replies to Sir Twickenham (whom he had seduced into a political argument) than the professional wit need employ; and as Mr. Powys’s talk was getting so attractive that the Court had become crowded, she gave a hint to Georgiana and Lady Charlotte, prompt lieutenants, whose retirement broke the circle.
“I never shall understand how it was done,” Adela said subsequently. It is hoped that everybody sees the importance of understanding such points.
She happened to be standing alone when a messenger came up to her and placed a letter in her hand, addressed to her sister Cornelia. Adela walked slowly up to the heights. She knew Mr. Barrett’s handwriting. “Good heavens!”—her thought may be translated out of Fine Shades—“does C. really in her heart feel so blind to our situation that she can go on playing still?” When she reached the group it was to hear Mr. Powys speaking of Mr. Barrett. Cornelia was very pale, and stood wretchedly in contrast among the faces. Adela beckoned her to step aside. “Here is a letter,” she said: “there’s no postmark. What has been the talk of that man?”
“Do you mean of Mr. Barrett?” Cornelia replied:—“that his father was a baronet, and a madman, who has just disinherited him.”
“Just?” cried Adela. She thought of the title. Cornelia had passed on. A bizarre story of Mr. Barrett’s father was related to Adela by Sir Twickenham. She grappled it with her sense, and so got nothing out of it. “Disinherited him because he wrote to his father, who was dying, to say that he had gained a livelihood by playing the organ! He had a hatred of music? It’s incomprehensible! You know, Sir Twickenham, the interest we take in Mr. Barrett.” The masked anguish of Cornelia’s voice hung in her ears. She felt that it was now possible Cornelia might throw over the rich for the penniless baronet, and absolutely for an instant she thought nakedly, “The former ought not to be lost to the family.” Thick clouds obscured the vision. Lady Gosstre had once told her that the point of Sir Twickenham’s private character was his susceptibility to ridicule. Her ladyship had at the same time complimented his discernment in conjunction with Cornelia. “Yes,” Adela now thought; “but if my sister shows that she is not so wise as she looks!” Cornelia’s figure disappeared under the foliage bordering Besworth Lawn.
As usual, Arabella had all the practical labour—a fact that was noticed from the observant heights. “One sees mere de famille written on that young woman,” was the eulogy she won from Lady Gosstre. How much would the great dame have marvelled to behold the ambition beneath the bustling surface! Arabella was feverish, and Freshfield Sumner reported brilliant things uttered by her. He became after a time her attendant, aide, and occasional wit-foil. They had some sharp exchanges: and he could not but reflect on the pleasure her keen zest of appreciation gave him compared with Cornelia’s grave smile, which had often kindled in him profane doubts of the positive brightness, or rapidity of her intelligence.
“Besworth at sunset! What a glorious picture to have living before you every day!” said Lady Charlotte to her companion.
Wilfrid flushed. She read his look; and said, when they were out of hearing, “What a place for old people to sit here near the end of life! The idea of it makes one almost forgive the necessity for getting old—doesn’t it? Tracy Runningbrook might make a poem about silver heads and sunset—something, you know! Very easy cantering then—no hunting! I suppose one wouldn’t have even a desire to go fast—a sort of cock-horse, just as we began with. The stables, let me tell you, are too near the scullery. One is bound to devise measures for the protection of the morals of the household.”
While she was speaking, Wilfrid’s thoughts ran: “My time has come to strike for liberty.”
This too she perceived, and was prepared for him.
He said: “Lady Charlotte, I feel that I must tell you…I fear that I have been calculating rather more hopefully…” Here the pitfall of sentiment yawned before him on a sudden. “I mean” (he struggled to avoid it, but was at the brink in the next sentence) “—I mean, dear lady, that I had hopes…Besworth pleased you… to offer you this…”
“With yourself?” she relieved him. A different manner in a protesting male would have charmed her better. She excused him, knowing what stood in his way.
“That I scarcely dared to hope,” said Wilfrid, bewildered to see the loose chain he had striven to cast off gather tightly round him.
“You do hope it?”
“I have.”
“You have hoped that I…” (she was not insolent by nature, and corrected the form) “—to marry me?”
“Yes, Lady Charlotte, I—I had that hope…if I could have offered this place—Besworth. I find that my father will never buy it; I have misunderstood him.”
He fixed his eyes on her, expecting a cool, or an ironical, rejoinder to end the colloquy;—after which, fair freedom! She answered, “We may do very well without it.”
Wilfrid was not equal to a start and the trick of rapturous astonishment. He heard the words like the shooting of dungeon-bolts, thinking, “Oh, heaven! if at the first I had only told the woman I do not love her!” But that sentimental lead had ruined him. And, on second thoughts, how could he have spoken thus to the point, when they had never previously dealt in anything save sentimental implications? The folly was in his speaking at all. The game was now in Lady Charlotte’s hands.
Adela, in another part of the field, had released herself by a consummate use of the same weapon Wilfrid had so clumsily handled. Her object was to put an end to the absurd and compromising sighs of Edward Buxley; and she did so with the amiable contempt of a pupil dismissing a first instructor in an art “We saw from the beginning it could not be, Edward.” The enamoured caricaturist vainly protested that he had not seen it from the beginning, and did not now. He recalled to her that she had said he was ‘her first.’ She admitted the truth, with eyes dwelling on him, until a ringlet got displaced. Her first. To be that, sentimental man would perish in the fires. To have been that will sometimes console him, even when he has lived to see what a thing he was who caught the budding fancy. The unhappy caricaturist groaned between triumph as a leader, and anguish at the prospect of a possible host of successors. King in that pure bosom, the thought would come—King of a mighty line, mayhap! And sentimental man, awakened to this disastrous view of things, endures shrewder pangs of rivalry in the contemplation of his usurping posterity than if, as do they, he looked forward to a tricked, perfumed, pommaded whipster, pirouetting like any Pierrot—the enviable image of the one who realized her first dream, and to whom specially missioned angels first opened the golden gates of her heart.
“I have learnt to see, Edward, that you do not honour me with a love you have diverted from one worthier than I am;” and in answer to the question whether, though having to abjure her love, she loved him: “No, no; it is my Arabella I love. I love, I will love, no one but her”—with sundry caressing ejaculations that spring a thirst for kisses, and a tender ‘putting of the case,’ now and then.
So much for Adela’s part in the conflict. Edward was unaware that the secret of her mastering him was, that she was now talking common-sense in the tone of sentiment. He, on the contrary, talked sentiment in the tone of common-sense. Of course he was beaten: and O, you young lovers, when you hear the dear lips setting what you call the world’s harsh language to this music, know that an hour has struck for you! It is a fatal sound to hear. Edward believed that his pleading had produced an effect when he saw Miss Adela’s bosom rise as with a weight on it. The burden of her thoughts was—“How big and heavy Edward’s eyes look when he is not amusing!” To get rid of him she said, as with an impassioned coldness, “Go.” Her figure, repeating this under closed eyelids, was mysterious, potent. When he exclaimed, “Then I will go,” her eyelids lifted wide: she shut them instantly, showing at the same time a slight tightening-in of the upper lip. You beheld a creature tied to the stake of Duty.
But she was exceedingly youthful, and had not reckoned upon man’s being a live machine, possessing impulses of his own. A violent seizure of her waist, and enough of kisses to make up the sum popularly known as a ‘shower,’ stopped her performance. She struggled, and muttered passionately to be released. “We are seen,” she hazarded. At the repetition, Edward, accustomed to dread the warning, let her go and fled. Turning hurriedly about, Adela found that she had spoken truth unawares, and never wished so much that she had lied. Sir Twickenham Pryme came forward to her, with his usual stiff courtly step.
“If you could have been a little—a little earlier,” she murmured, with an unflurried face, laying a trembling hand in his; and thus shielded herself from a suspicion.
“Could I know that I was wanted?” He pressed her hand.
“I only know that I wish I had not left your side,” said she—adding, “Though you must have thought me what, if I were a man, you Members of Parliament would call ‘a bore,’ for asking perpetual questions.”
“Nay, an apposite interrogation is the guarantee of a proper interest in the subject,” said the baronet.
Cornelia was very soon reverted to.
“Her intellect is contemplative,” said Adela, exhibiting marvellous mental composure. “She would lose her unerring judgement in active life. She cannot weigh things in her mind rapidly. She is safe if her course of action is clear.”
Sir Twickenham reserved his opinion of the truth of this. “I wonder whether she can forgive those who offend or insult her, easily?”
A singular pleasure warmed Adela’s veins. Her cheeks kindling, she replied, giving him her full face. “No; if they are worthy of punishment. But—” and now he watched a downcast profile—“one must have some forgiveness for fools.”
“Indeed, you speak like charity out of the windows of wisdom,” said the baronet.
“Do you not require in Parliament to be tolerant at times?” Adela pursued.
He admitted it, and to her outcry of “Oh, that noble public life!” smiled deprecatingly—“My dear young lady, if you only knew the burden it brings!”
“It brings its burden,” said Adela, correcting, with a most proper instinct, another enthusiastic burst. “At the same time the honour is above the load. Am I talking too romantically? You are at least occupied.”
“Nine-tenths of us to no very good purpose,” the baronet appended.
She rejoined: “If it were but a fraction, the good done would survive.”
“And be more honourable to do, perhaps,” he ejaculated. “The consolation should be great.”
“And is somehow small,” said she; and they laughed softly.
At this stage, Adela was ‘an exceedingly interesting young person’ in Sir Twickenham’s mental register. He tried her on politics and sociology. She kept her ears open, and followed his lead carefully—venturing here and there to indicate an opinion, and suggesting dissent in a pained interrogation. Finally, “I confess,” she said, “I understand much less than I am willing to think; and so I console myself with the thought that, after all, the drawing-room, and the… the kitchen?—well, an educated ‘female’ must serve her term there, if she would be anything better than a mere ornament, even in the highest walks of life—I mean the household is our sphere. From that we mount to companionship—if we can.”
Amazement of Sir Twickenham, on finding his own thought printed, as it were, on the air before him by these pretty lips!
The conversation progressed, until Adela, by chance, turned her eyes up a cross pathway and perceived her sister Cornelia standing with Mr. Barrett under a beech. The man certainly held one of her hands pressed to his heart; and her attitude struck a doubt whether his other hand was disengaged or her waist free. Adela walked nervously on without looking at the baronet; she knew by his voice presently that his eyes had also witnessed the sight. “Two in a day,” she thought; “what will he imagine us to be!” The baronet was thinking: “For your sister exposed, you display more agitation than for yourself insulted.”
Adela found Arabella in so fresh a mood that she was sure good news had been heard. It proved that Mrs. Chump had sent a few lines in a letter carried by Braintop, to this effect: “My dears all! I found your father on his back in bed, and he discharged me out of the room; and the sight of me put him on his legs, and you will soon see him. Be civil to Mr. Braintop, who is a faithful young man, of great merit, and show your gratitude to—Martha Chump.”
Braintop confirmed the words of the letter: and then Adela said—“You will do us the favour to stay and amuse yourself here. To-night there will be a bed at Brookfield.”
“What will he do?” Arabella whispered.
“Associate with the Tinleys,” returned Adela.
In accordance with the sentiment here half concealed, Brookfield soon showed that it had risen from the hour of depression when it had simply done its duty. Arabella formed an opposition-Court to the one in which she had studied; but Mr. Pericles defeated her by constantly sending to her for advice concerning the economies of the feast. Nevertheless, she exhibited good pretensions to social queendom, both personal and practical; and if Freshfield Sumner, instead of his crisp waspish comments on people and things, had seconded her by keeping up a two-minutes’ flow of talk from time to time, she might have thought that Lady Gosstre was only luckier than herself—not better endowed.
Below, the Tinleys and their set surrounded Mr. Pericles—prompting him, as was seen, to send up continual messages. One, to wit, “Is there to be dancing to-night?” being answered, “Now, if you please,” provoked sarcastic cheering; and Laura ran up to say, “How kind of you! We appreciate it. Continue to dispense blessings on poor mortals.”
“By the way, though” (Freshfield took his line from the calm closed lips of his mistress), “poor mortals are not in the habit of climbing Olympus to ask favours.”
“I perceived no barrier,” quoth Laura.
“Audacity never does.”
“Pray, how am I to be punished?”
Freshfield paused for a potent stroke. “Not like Semele. She saw the God:—you never will!”
While Laura was hanging on the horrid edge between a false laugh and a starting blush, Arabella said: “That visual excommunication has been pronounced years ago, Freshfield.”
“Ah! then he hasn’t changed his name in heaven?” Laura touched her thus for the familiar use of the gentle-man’s Christian name.
“You must not imagine that very great changes are demanded of those who can be admitted.”
“I really find it hotter than below,” said Laura, flying.
Arabella’s sharp eyes discerned a movement in Lady Gosstre’s circle; and she at once went over to her, and entreated the great lady, who set her off so well, not to go. The sunset fronted Besworth Lawn; the last light of day was danced down to inspiriting music: and now Arabella sent word for Besworth hall-doors and windows to be opened; and on the company beginning to disperse, there beckoned promise of a brilliant supper-table.
“Admirable!” said Lady Gosstre, and the encomium was general among the crowd surrounding Arabella; for up to this point the feasting had been delicate, and something like plain hunger prevailed. Indeed, Arabella had heard remarks of a bad nature, which she traced to the Tinley set, and bore with, to meet her present reward. Making light of her triumph, she encouraged Freshfield to start a wit-contest, and took part in it herself, with the gaiety of an unoccupied mind. Her sisters had aforetime more than once challenged her supremacy, but they bowed to it now; and Adela especially did when, after a ringing hit to Freshfield (which the Tinleys might also take to their own bosoms), she said in an undertone, “What is there between C. and—?” Surprised by this astonishing vigilance and power of thinking below the surface while she performed above it, Adela incautiously turned her face toward the meditative baronet, and was humiliated by Arabella’s mute indication of contempt for her coming answer. This march across the lawn to the lighted windows of Besworth was the culmination of Brookfield’s joy, and the crown for which it had striven; though for how short a term it was to be worn was little known. Was it not a very queenly sphere of Fine Shades and Nice Feelings that Brookfield had realized?
In Arabella’s conscience lay a certain reproach of herself for permitting the “vice of a lower circle” to cling to her—viz., she had still betrayed a stupid hostility to the Tinleys: she had rejoiced to see them incapable of mixing with any but their own set, and thus be stamped publicly for what they were. She had struggled to repress it, and yet, continually, her wits were in revolt against her judgement. Perhaps one reason was that Albert Tinley had haunted her steps at an early part of the day; and Albert—a sickening City young man, “full of insolence, and half eyeglass,” according to Freshfield—had once ventured to propose for her.
The idea that the Tinleys strove to catch at her skirts made Arabella spiteful. Up to the threshold of Besworth, Freshfield, Mr. Powys, Tracy, and Arabella kept the wheel of a dazzling run of small-talk, throwing intermittent sparks. Laura Tinley would press up, apparently to hear, but in reality (as all who knew her could see) with the object of being a rival representative of her sex in this illustrious rare encounter of divine intelligences. “You are anxious to know?” said Arabella, hesitatingly.
“To know, dear?” echoed Laura.
“There was, I presumed, something you did not hear.” Arabella was half ashamed of the rudeness to which her antagonism to Laura’s vulgarity forced her.
“Oh! I hear everything,” Laura assured her.
“Indeed!” said Arabella. “By the way, who conducts you?” (Laura was on Edward Burley’s arm.) “Oh! will you go to”—such and such an end of the table. “And if, Lady Gosstre, I may beg of you to do me the service to go there also,” was added aloud; and lower, but quite audibly, “Mr. Pericles will have music, so there can be no talking.” This, with the soupcon of a demi-shrug; “You will not suffer much” being implied. Laura said to herself, “I am not a fool.” A moment after, Arabella was admitting in her own mind, as well as Fine Shades could interpret it, that she was. On entering the dining-hall, she beheld two figures seated at the point whither Laura was led by her partner. These were Mrs. Chump and Mr. Pole, with champagne glasses in their hands. Arabella was pushed on by the inexorable crowd of hungry people behind.
CHAPTER XXXII
Despite the pouring in of the flood of guests about the tables, Mrs. Chump and Mr. Pole sat apparently unconcerned in their places, and, as if to show their absolute indifference to observation and opinion, went through the ceremony of drinking to one another, upon which they nodded and chuckled: a suspicious eye had the option of divining that they used the shelter of the table cloth for an interchange of squeezes. This would have been further strengthened by Mrs. Chump’s arresting exclamation, “Pole! Company!” Mr. Pole looked up. He recognized Lady Gosstre, and made an attempt, in his usual brisk style, to salute her. Mrs. Champ drew him back. “Nothin’ but his legs, my lady,” she whispered. “There’s nothin’ sets ‘m up like champagne, my dears!” she called out to the Three of Brookfield.
Those ladies were now in the hall, gazing, as mildly as humanity would allow, at their common destiny, thus startlingly displayed. There was no doubt in the bosom of either one of them that exposure was to follow this prelude. Mental resignation was not even demanded of them—merely physical. They did not seek comfort in an interchange of glances, but dropped their eyes, and masked their sight as they best could. Caesar assassinated did a similar thing.
“My dears!” pursued Mrs. Chump, in Irish exaggerated by wine, “I’ve found ‘m for ye! And if ye’d seen ‘m this afternoon—the little peaky, shaky fellow that he was! and a doctor, too, feelin’ his pulse. ‘Is ut slow,’ says I, ‘doctor?’ and draws a bottle of champagne. He could hardly stand before his first glass. ‘Pon my hon’r, my lady, ye naver saw s’ch a change in a mortal bein.—Pole, didn’t ye go ‘ha, ha!’ now, and seem to be nut-cracking with your fingers? He did; and if ye aver saw an astonished doctor! ‘Why,’ says I, ‘doctor, ye think ut’s maguc! Why, where’s the secret? drink with ‘m, to be sure! And you go and do that, my lord doctor, my dear Mr. Doctor! Do ut all round, and your patients ‘ll bless your feet.” Why, isn’t cheerful society and champagne the vary best of medicines, if onnly the blood ‘ll go of itself a little? The fault’s in his legs; he’s all right at top!—if he’d smooth his hair a bit.
Checking her tongue, Mrs. Chump performed this service lightly for him, in the midst of his muttered comments on her Irish.
The fact was manifest to the whole assembly, that they had indeed been drinking champagne to some purpose.
Wilfrid stepped up to two of his sisters, warning them hurriedly not to go to their father: Adela he arrested with a look, but she burst the restraint to fulfil a child’s duty. She ran up gracefully, and taking her father’s hand, murmured a caressing “Dear papa!”
“There—all right—quite right—quite well,” Mr. Pole repeated. “Glad to see you all: go away.”
He tried to look kindly out of the nervous fit into which a word, in a significant tone, from one of his daughters had instantly plunged him. Mrs. Chump admonished her: “Will ye undo all that I’ve been doin’ this blessed day?”
“Glad you haven’t missed the day altogether, sir,” Wilfrid greeted his father in an offhand way.
“Ah, my boy!” went the old man, returning him what was meant for a bluff nod.
Lady Charlotte gave Wilfrid an open look. It meant: “If you can act like that, and know as much as I know, you are worth more than I reckoned.” He talked evenly and simply, and appeared on the surface as composed as any of the guests present. Nor was he visibly disturbed when Mrs. Chump, catching his eye, addressed him aloud:—
“Ye’d have been more grateful to me to have brought little Belloni as well now, I know, Mr. Wilfrid. But I was just obliged to leave her at the hotel; for Pole can’t endure her. He ‘bomunates the sight of ‘r. If ye aver saw a dog burnt by the fire, Pole’s second to ‘m, if onnly ye speak that garl’s name.”
The head of a strange musician, belonging to the band stationed outside, was thrust through one of the window apertures. Mr. Pericles beckoned him imperiously to retire, and perform. He objected, and an altercation in bad English diverted the company. It was changed to Italian. “Mia figlia,” seized Wilfrid’s ear. Mr. Pericles bellowed, “Allegro.” Two minutes after Braintop felt a touch on his shoulder; and Wilfrid, speaking in a tone of friend to friend, begged him to go to town by the last train and remove Miss Belloni to an hotel, which he named. “Certainly,” said Braintop; “but if I meet her father…?” Wilfrid summoned champagne for him; whereupon Mrs. Chump cried out, “Ye’re kind to wait upon the young man, Mr. Wilfrid; and that Mr. Braintop’s an invalu’ble young man. And what do ye want with the hotel, when we’ve left it, Mr. Paricles?”
The Greek raised his head from Mr. Pole, shrugging at her openly. He and Wilfrid then measured eyes a moment. “Some champagne togezer?” said Mr. Pericles. “With all my heart,” was the reply; and their glasses were filled, and they bowed, and drank. Wilfrid took his seat, drew forth his pocket-book; and while talking affably to Lady Charlotte beside him, and affecting once or twice to ponder over her remarks, or to meditate a fitting answer, wrote on a slip of paper under the table:—
“Mine! my angel! You will see me to-morrow.
“YOUR LOVER.”
This, being inserted in an envelope, with zig-zag letters of address to form Emilia’s name, he contrived to pass to Braintop’s hands, and resumed his conversation with Lady Charlotte, who said, when there was nothing left to discover, “But what is it you concoct down there?” “I!” cried Wilfrid, lifting his hands, and so betraying himself after the fashion of the very innocent. She despised any reading of acts not on the surface, and nodded to the explanation he gave—to wit: “By the way, do you mean—have you noticed my habit of touching my fingers’ ends as I talk? I count them backwards and forwards.”
“Shows nervousness,” said Lady Charlotte; “you are a boy!”
“Exceedingly a boy.”
“Now I put a finger on his vanity,” said she; and thought indeed that she had played on him.
“Mr. Pole,” (Lady Gosstre addressed that gentleman,) “I must hope that you will leave this dining-hall as it is; there is nothing in the neighbourhood to match it!”
“Delightful!” interposed Laura Tinley; “but is it settled?”
Mr. Pole leaned forward to her ladyship; and suddenly catching the sense of her words, “Ah, why not?” he said, and reached his hand to some champagne, which he raised to his mouth, but drank nothing of. Reflection appeared to tell him that his safety lay in drinking, and he drained the glass at a gulp. Mrs. Chump had it filled immediately, and explained to a wondering neighbour, “It’s that that keeps ‘m on his legs.”
“We shall envy you immensely,” said Laura Tinley to Arabella; who replied, “I assure you that no decision has been come to.”
“Ah, you want to surprise us with cards on a sudden from Besworth!”
“That is not the surprise I have in store,” returned Arabella sedately.
“Then you have a surprise? Do tell me.”
“How true to her sex is the lady who seeks to turn ‘what it is’ into ‘what it isn’t!’” said Freshfield, trusty lieutenant.
“I think a little peeping makes surprises sweeter; I’m weak enough to think that,” Lady Charlotte threw in.
“That is so true!” exclaimed Laura.
“Well; and a secret shared is a fact uncommonly well aired—that is also true. But, remember, you do not desire the surprise; you are a destroying force to it;” and Freshfield bowed.
“Curiosity!” sighed some one, relieving Freshfield from a sense of the guilt of heaviness.
“I am a Pandora,” Laura smilingly said.
“To whom?” Tracy Runningbrook’s shout was heard.
“With champagne in the heads of the men, and classics in the heads of the women, we shall come; to something,” remarked Lady Gosstre half to herself and Georgiana near her.
An observer of Mr. Pole might have seen that he was fretting at a restriction on his tongue. Occasionally he would sit forward erect in his chair, shake his coat-collar, frown, and sound a preparatory ‘hem; but it ended in his rubbing his hair away on the back of his head. Mrs. Chump, who was herself perceiving new virtues in champagne with every glass, took the movements as indicative of a companion exploration of the spiritual resources of this vintage. She no longer called for it, but lifted a majestic finger (a Siddons or tenth-Muse finger, as Freshfield named it) behind the row of heads; upon which champagne speedily bubbled in the glasses. Laughter at the performance had fairly set in. Arabella glanced nervously round for Mr. Pericles, who looked at his watch and spread the fingers of one hand open thrice—an act that telegraphed fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes an opera troupe, with three famous chiefs and a renowned prima-donna were to arrive. The fact was known solely to Arabella and Mr. Pericles. It was the Surprise of the evening. But within fifteen minutes, what might not happen, with heads going at champagne-pace?
Arabella proposed to Freshfield to rise. “Don’t the ladies go first?” the wit turned sensualist stammered; and incurred that worse than frown, a cold look of half-comprehension, which reduces indefinitely the proportions of the object gazed at. There were probably a dozen very young men in the room waiting to rise with their partners at a signal for dancing; and these could not be calculated upon to take an initiative, or follow one—as ladies, poor slaves! will do when the electric hostess rustles. The men present were non-conductors. Arabella knew that she could carry off the women, but such a proceeding would leave her father at the mercy of the wine; and, moreover, the probability was that Mrs. Chump would remain by him, and, sole in a company of males, explode her sex with ridicule, Brookfield in the bargain. So Arabella, under a prophetic sense of evil, waited; and this came of it. Mr. Pole patted Mrs. Chump’s hand publicly. In spite of the steady hum of small-talk—in spite of Freshfield Sumner’s circulation of a crisp anecdote—in spite of Lady Gosstre’s kind effort to stop him by engaging him in conversation, Mr. Pole forced on for a speech. He said that he had not been the thing lately. It might be his legs, as his dear friend Martha, on his right, insisted; but he had felt it in his head, though as strong as any man present.
“Harrk at ‘m!” cried Mrs. Chump, letting her eyes roll fondly away from him into her glass.
“Business, my lady!” Mr. Pole resumed. “Ah, you don’t know what that is. We’ve got to work hard to keep our heads up equal with you. We don’t swim with corks. And my old friend, Ralph Tinley—he sells iron, and has got a mine. That’s simple. But, my God, ma’am, when a man has his eye on the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic, and the Baltic, and the Black Sea, and half-a-dozen colonies at once, he—you—”
“Well, it’s a precious big eye he’s got, Pole,” Mrs. Chump came to his relief.
“—he don’t know whether he’s a ruined dog, or a man to hold up his head in any company.”
“Oh, Lord, Pole, if ye’re going to talk of beggary!” Mrs. Chump threw up her hands. “My lady, I naver could abide the name of ‘t. I’m a kind heart, ye know, but I can’t bear a ragged friend. I hate ‘m! He seems to give me a pinch.”
Having uttered this, it struck her that it was of a kind to convulse Mrs. Lupin, for whose seizures she could never accurately account; and looking round, she perceived, sure enough, that little forlorn body agitated, with a handkerchief to her mouth.
