The Essential George Meredith Collection. George Meredith
not designed for the reading of Mr. Pole.
"I think you must be wrong as to Mr. Barrett's position," said Adela.
"No, dear; not at all," Laura was quick to reply. "Unless you know anything. He has stated that he awaits money remittances. He has, in fact, overrun the constable, and my brother Albert says, the constable is very likely to overrun ham, in consequence. Only a joke! But an organist with, at the highest computation--poor absurd thing!--fifty-five pounds per annum: additional for singing lessons, it is true,--but an organist with a bookseller's bill of twenty-three pounds! Consider!"
"Foreign books, too!" interjected Adela.
"Not so particularly improving to his morals, either!" added Laura.
"You are severe upon the greater part of the human race," said Arabella.
"So are the preachers, dear," returned Laura.
"The men of our religion justify you?" asked Arabella.
"Let me see;--where were we?" Laura retreated in an affected mystification.
"You had reached the enlightened belief that books written by any but English hands were necessarily destructive of men's innocence," said Arabella; and her sisters thrilled at the neatness of the stroke, for the moment, while they forgot the ignoble object it transfixed. Laura was sufficiently foiled by it to be unable to return to the Chips-Barrett theme. Throughout the interview Cornelia had maintained a triumphant posture, superior to Arabella's skill in fencing, seeing that it exposed no weak point of the defence by making an attack, and concealed especially the confession implied by a relish for the conflict. Her sisters considerately left her to recover herself, after this mighty exercise of silence.
CHAPTER XXII
Cornelia sat with a clenched hand. "You are rich and he is poor," was the keynote of her thoughts, repeated from minute to minute. "And it is gold gives you the right in the world's eye to despise him!" she apostrophized the vanished Laura, clothing gold with all the baseness of that person. Now, when one really hates gold, one is at war with one's fellows. The tide sets that way. There is no compromise: to hate it is to try to stem the flood. It happens that this is one of the temptations of the sentimentalist, who should reflect, but does not, that the fine feelers by which the iniquities of gold are so keenly discerned, are a growth due to it, nevertheless. Those 'fine feelers,' or antennae of the senses, come of sweet ease; that is synonymous with gold in our island-latitude. The sentimentalists are represented by them among the civilized species. It is they that sensitively touch and reject, touch and select; whereby the laws of the polite world are ultimately regulated, and civilization continually advanced, sometimes ridiculously. The sentimentalists are ahead of us, not by weight of brain, but through delicacy of nerve, and, like all creatures in the front, they are open to be victims. I pray you to observe again the shrinking life that afflicts the adventurous horns of the snail, for example. Such are the sentimentalists to us--the fat body of mankind. We owe them much, and though they scorn us, let us pity them.
Especially when they are young they deserve pity, for they suffer cruelly. I for my part prefer to see boys and girls led into the ways of life by nature; but I admit that in many cases, in most cases, our good mother has not (occupied as her hands must be) made them perfectly presentable; by which fact I am warned to have tolerance for the finer beings who labour under these excessive sensual subtleties. I perceive their uses. And they are right good comedy; for which I may say that I almost love them. Man is the laughing animal: and at the end of an infinite search, the philosopher finds himself clinging to laughter as the best of human fruit, purely human, and sane, and comforting. So let us be cordially thankful to those who furnish matter for sound embracing laughter.
Cornelia detested gold--entirely on general grounds and for abstract reasons. Not a word of Mr. Barrett was shaped, even in fancy; but she interjected to herself, with meditative eye and mouth: "The saints were poor!" (the saints of whom he had read, translating from that old Latin book) "St. Francis! how divine was his life!" and so forth, until the figure of Mr. Penniless Barrett walked out in her imagination clad in saintly garments, superior not only to his creditor, Mr. Chips, but to all who bought or sold.
"I have been false," she said; implying the "to him." Seeing him on that radiant height above her, she thought "How could I have fallen so!" It was impossible for her mind to recover the delusion which had prompted her signing herself to bondage--pledging her hand to a man she did not love. Could it have been that she was guilty of the immense folly, simply to escape from that piece of coarse earth, Mrs. Chump? Cornelia smiled sadly, saying: "Oh, no! I should not have committed a wickedness for so miserable an object." Despairing for a solution of the puzzle, she cried out, "I was mad!", and with a gasp of horror saw herself madly signing her name to perdition.
"I was mad!" is a comfortable cloak to our sins in the past. Mournful to think that we have been bereft of reason; but the fit is over, and we are not in Bedlam!
Cornelia next wrestled with the pride of Mr. Barrett. Why had he not come to her once after reading the line pencilled in the book? Was it that he would make her his debtor in everything? He could have reproached her justly; why had he held aloof? She thirsted to be scourged by him, to hang her head ashamed under his glance, and hug the bitter pain he dealt her. Revolving how the worst man on earth would have behaved to a girl partially in his power (hands had been permitted to be pressed, and the gateways of the eyes had stood open: all but vows had been interchanged), she came to regard Mr. Barrett as the best man on the earth. That she alone saw it, did not depreciate the value of her knowledge. A goal gloriously illumined blazed on her from the distance. "Too late!" she put a curb on the hot courses in her brain, and they being checked, turned all at once to tears and came in a flood. How indignant would the fair sentimentalist have been at a whisper of her caring for the thing before it was too late!
Cornelia now daily trod the red pathways under the firs, and really imagined herself to be surprised, even vexed, when she met Mr. Barrett there at last. Emilia was by his side, near a drooping birch. She beckoned to Cornelia, whose North Pole armour was doing its best to keep down a thumping heart.
"We are taking our last walk in the old wood," said, Mr. Barrett, admirably collected. "That is, I must speak for myself."
"You leave early?" Cornelia felt her throat rattle hideously.
"In two days, I expect--I hope," said he.
"Why does he hope?" thought Cornelia, wounded, until a vision of the detaining Chips struck her with pity and remorse.
She turned to Emilia. "Our dear child is also going to leave us."
"I?" cried Emilia, fierily out of languor.
"Does not your Italy claim you?"
"I am nothing to Italy any more. Have I not said so? I love England now."
Cornelia smiled complacently. "Let us hope your heart is capacious enough to love both."
"Then your theory is" (Mr. Barrett addressed Cornelia in the winning old style), "that the love of one thing enlarges the heart for another?"
"Should it not?" She admired his cruel self-possession pitiably, as she contrasted her own husky tones with it.
Emilia looked from one to the other, fancying that they must have her case somewhere in prospect, since none could be unconscious of the vehement struggle going on in her bosom; but they went farther and farther off from her comprehension, and seemed to speak of bloodless matters. "And yet he is her lover," she thought. "When they meet they talk across a river, and he knows she is going to another man, and does not gripe her wrist and drag her away!" The sense that she had no kinship with such flesh shut her mouth faster than Wilfrid's injunctions (which were ordinarily conveyed in too subtle a manner for her to feel their meaning enough to find them binding). Cornelia, for a mask to her emotions, gave Emilia a gentle, albeit high-worded lecture on the artist's duty toward Art, quoting favourite passages from Mr. Barrett's favourite Art-critic. And her fashion of