"White as a lily, and small as a wand"—
"White as a lily, and small as a wand"—
like Lance's sister, dressed with that neat, tight, gray-tinted simplicity, severe yet smart, which marks the well-bred Englishwoman on her travels. Is it one of the younger ones, who has grown up so startlingly like her? Miriam? Rose? or is it, can it be, the dead Elizabeth?
In a ripe civilization such as ours there are formulas provided to meet the requirements of every exigency that may possibly arise; but amongst them there is not one which teaches us how to greet a person come back from the dead, because it is held impossible that such a contingency can occur. Perhaps this is the reason why Jim Burgoyne, usually a docile and obedient member of the society to which he belongs, now flies in the face of all the precepts instilled into him by that society's code. At the sight of Elizabeth Le Marchant entering the room, clad in a very neat tailor gown, instead of the winding-sheet with which he had credited her, he at first stands transfixed, staring at her with a hardness of intensity which is allowed to us in the case of Titian's "Bella," or Botticelli's "Spring," but has never been accounted permissible in the case of a more living loveliness. Then, before he can control, or even question the impulse that drives him, it has carried him to her.
"Elizabeth!" he says, in that sort of awed semi-whisper with which one would salute a being plainly returned from the other side, fearing that the fulness of a living voice might strike too strongly on his disused ear—"is it really Elizabeth?"
Had Burgoyne been quite sure, even now, of that fact; if he had had his wits well about him, he would certainly not have addressed her by her Christian name. But from the dead the small pomps and ceremonies of earth fall off. We think of them by their naked names—must we not then appeal to them by the same when they reappear before us?
The girl—for she does not look much more—thus rudely and startlingly bombarded, drops her Baedeker out of her slim-gloved hand, and with a positive jump at the suddenness of the address, looks back apprehensively at her interlocutor. In her eyes is, at first, only the coldly frightened expression of one discourteously assailed by an insolent stranger; but in a space of time as short as had served him to note the same metamorphosis in the case of her parents, he sees the look of half—three-quarter—whole recognition dawn in her eyes, followed—alas! there can be no mistake about it—by the same aspiration after flight. There is no reason why she should not recognise him again at once. He has fallen a prey neither to hair nor fat—the two main disguisers and disfigurers of humanity. His face is as smooth and his figure as spare as when, ten years ago, he had given the pretty tomboy of sixteen lessons in jumping the ha-ha. And as to her identity, no shadow of doubt any longer lingers in his mind.
The violence and shock of his attack have made her crimson, have matched her cheeks with those long-withered damasks in the Moat garden, with which they used to vie in bloomy vividness. But even yet he does not treat her quite as if she were really and veritably living; he has not yet got back his conventional manners.
"I thought you were dead," he says, his voice not even yet raised to its ordinary key, some vague awe still subduing it.
It must be a trick of his excited imagination that makes it seem to him as if she said under her breath, "So I am!"
But before he has had time to do more than distrust the testimony of his ears, Mrs. Le Marchant strikes in quickly—
"We cannot help what Mr. Burgoyne thinks," says she, with a constrained laugh; "but you are not dead, are you, Elizabeth? We are neither of us dead; on the contrary, we are very much alive. Who can help being alive in this heavenly place? And you? When did you come? What hotel are you at? Have you been here long? Do you make a long stay?"
She pours out her questions with such torrent-force and rapidity, as gives to her auditor the conviction that it is her aim to have a monopoly of them.
After one look of unbounded astonishment at his companion's onslaught, Byng has withdrawn to a discreet distance.
"You never mentioned her when I met you in Oxford," says Burgoyne, disregarding her trivial and conventional questions, and turning his eyes away with difficulty from his old playfellow.
Mrs. Le Marchant laughs again, still constrainedly.
"Probably you never asked after her."
"I was afraid," he says solemnly; "after ten years one is afraid; and as you did not mention her—you know you mentioned all the others—I thought you had lost her!"
A sort of slight shiver passes over the woman's frame.
"No, thank God! No!"
During the foregoing little dialogue about herself, Elizabeth has stood with her eyes on the ground; but at the end of it she lifts them to smile lovingly at her mother. They are very pretty eyes still, but surely they seem to have cried a good deal; and now that the hurrying blood has left her cheek again, Burgoyne sees that she looks more nearly her age than he had imagined at the first glance. He has not heard her voice yet; she has not spoken, unless that first shaken whisper—so much more likely to be the freak of his own heated fancy—could count for speech. He must hear her tones. Do they keep an echo of the other world, as he still imagines that he sees a shade from it lying lingeringly across her face?
"Do you ever climb apple-trees now?" he asks abruptly. She starts slightly, and again, though with a weaker red wave, her rather thin cheeks grow tinged.
"Did I ever climb them?" she says, with a bewildered look, and speaking in a somewhat tremulous voice. "Yes"—slowly, as if with an effort of memory—"I believe I did."
"You have forgotten all about it?" cries Jim, in an accent of absurdly disproportioned disappointment. "Have you forgotten the kangaroo too? have you forgotten everything?"
Perhaps she is putting her memory to the same strain as he had done his in the case of her mother's name on the occasion of their Oxford meeting. At all events, she leaves the question unanswered, and the elder woman again hurries to her help against this persistent claimant of reminiscences.
"You must not expect us all to have such memories as you have," she says with a touch of friendliness in her look.
"I must own that I too had quite forgotten the kangaroo; and so I fear had Robert, until you reminded us of it in Mesopotamia."
"How is Mr. Le Marchant?" inquires Jim, thus reminded to put his tardy query—"is he with you?"
"No, he is not very fond of being abroad; it is not"—smiling—"'dear abroad' to him, but I think that he will very likely come out to Florence to fetch us."
"You are going to Florence?" cries the young man eagerly. "So am I! oh, hurrah! then we shall often meet."
But the touch of friendliness, whose advent he had hailed so joyfully, has vanished out of Mrs. Le Marchant's voice, or, at least, is overlaid with a species of stiffness, as she answers distantly, "We do not intend to go out at all in Florence—I mean into society."
"But I am not society," replies he, chilled, yet resolute. "I wish"—glancing rather wistfully from one to the other—"that Icouldgive you a little of my memory. If I could, you would see that, after being so infinitely good to me at the Moat, you cannot expect me to meet you as total strangers now."
In the sense of ill-usage that fills his breast, the fact of how almost entirely oblivious he had been of the persons before him, during the greater part of the long interval that had parted them, has—such is human nature—quite slipped his recollection. It is brought back to him in some degree with a twinge by Mrs. Le Marchant saying in a relenting tone, and with an accent of remorse, "And you have remembered us all these years?"
He cannot, upon reflection, conscientiously say that he has; but is yet disingenuous enough to allow a speaking silence to imply acquiescence.
"And you are on your way to Florence too?" continues she, mistaking the cause of his dumbness; the tide of compunction evidently setting more strongly towards him, in her womanly heart, at the thought of the entire want of interest she has manifested in the case of one whose long faithfulness to her and her family had deserved a better treatment.
"Yes."
His face clouds so perceptibly as he pronounces this monosyllable, that his interlocutor inquires, with a growing kindness:
"Not on any unpleasant errand, I hope?"
He laughs the uneasy laugh of an Anglo-Saxon obliged to tell, or at all events telling, some intimate detail about himself.
"I am going to see my young woman—the girl I am engaged to."
"Well, that is a pleasant errand, surely?" (smiling).
"C'est salon!" replies Jim gloomily. "I have a piece of ill-news to tell her;" then, with a half-shy effort to escape into generalities, "which way do you think that ill-news read best—on paper orvivâ voce?"
She shivers a little.
"I do not know. I do not like them either way."
Then, taking out her watch, with the evident determination to be surprised at the lateness of the hour, she cries, "It is actually a quarter to two! Are not you famished, Elizabeth? I am!"
There is such apparent and imminent departure in her eye that Burgoyne feels that there is no time to be lost.
"Have you decided upon your hotel in Florence?" he asks precipitately.
"We have decided against them all," is her answer. "We have taken a little apartment—a poor littleentresol; but it is such a poor little one, that I should be ashamed to ask any of my friends to come and see me there."
She accompanies the last words, as if to take the sting out of them, with as sweet and friendly a smile as any he remembers in the Devonshire days. But the sting is not taken out, all the same; it lingers, pricking and burning still, after both the tall, thin, black figure, and the slim, little gray one have disappeared.
The moment that this is the case, Byng rejoins his friend; a curiosity and alert interest in his young eyes, which his companion feels no desire to gratify. He is unable, however, to maintain the entire silence he had intended upon the subject, since Byng, after waiting for what, to his impatience, appears a more than decent interval, is constrained to remark—
"Did I hear you tell that lady, when first you spoke to her, that she was dead?"
"I thought she was."
"Had you heard it?"
"No."
"Did you see it in the papers?"
"No."
A pause.
"I wonder why you thought she was dead."
The other makes a rather impatient movement.
"I had no reason—none whatever. It was an idiotic inference."
Byng draws a long breath of satisfaction.
"Well, at all events, I am very glad that she is not."
Jim turns upon him with something of the expression of face worn by Mrs. Sarah Gamp on hearing Mrs. Prig express her belief that it was not by Mrs. Harris that her services would be required. "Why should you be glad of that, Betsy? She is unbeknown to you except by hearing. Why should you be glad?"
As Byng's case is a more aggravated one than Mrs. Prig's, seeing that Elizabeth Le Marchant is 'unbeknown' to him even by hearing, so is the warmth, or rather coldness, with which his friend receives his remark not inferior to that of "Sairey."
"I do not quite see how it affects you. Why are you glad?"
"Why am I glad?" replies the younger man, with a lightening eye. "For the same reason that I am glad that Vandyke painted that picture"—pointing to it—"or that Shakespeare wroteAs You Like It. The world is the richer by them all three."
But to this poetic and flattering analogy, Jim's only answer is a surly "Humph!"
"There are no more by-path meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. You may think you had a conscience and believed in God; but what is conscience to a wife?.... To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is nothing left for you—not even suicide—but to be good."
"There are no more by-path meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. You may think you had a conscience and believed in God; but what is conscience to a wife?.... To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is nothing left for you—not even suicide—but to be good."
There is no particular reason why Burgoyne should not impart to his companion what he knows—after all it is not very much—about their two countrywomen. Upon reflection he had told himself this, and conquered a reluctance, that he cannot account for, to mentioning their name; and to relating the story of those shadowy idyllic two months of his life, which form all of it that has ever come into contact with theirs. So that by the time—some thirty-six hours later—when they reach Florence, the younger man is in possession of as much information about the objects of their common interest as it is in the power of the elder one to impart.
To neither of them, meanwhile, is any second glimpse vouchsafed of those objects, eagerly—though with different degrees of overtness in that eagerness—as they both look out for them among the luggage-piles and the tweed-clad English ladies at the station. It had been the intention of Burgoyne that he and his friend should put up at the same hotel as that inhabited by his betrothed and her family; hut, finding that it is full, he orders rooms at the Minerva, and in the fallen dusk of a rather chill spring night, finds himself traversing the short distance from the railway to that hotel.
As he and Byng sit over their coffee after dinner in thesalle à manger, almost its only tenants at that late hour, the younger man remarks matter-of-factly, as if stating a proposition almost too obvious to be worth uttering—
"I suppose you are off to the Anglo-Américain now."
"I think not," replies Jim slowly; "it is past ten, you see, and they are early people." He adds a moment later, as if suspecting his own excuse of insufficiency, "Mr. Wilson is rather an invalid, and there is also an invalid or semi-invalid sister; I think that I had better not disturb them to-night."
Byng has never been engaged to be married, except in theory, and it is certainly no business of his to blow his friend's flagging ardour into flame, so he contents himself with an acquiescent observation to the effect that the train must have been late. But at all events the next morning finds Burgoyne paying his fiacre at the door of the Anglo-Américain, with the confidence of a person who is certain of finding those he seeks, a confidence justified by the result; for, having followed a waiter across a courtyard, and heard him knock at a door on the ground-floor, that door opens with an instantaneousness which gives the idea of an ear having been pricked to catch the expected rap, and the next moment, the interveninggarçonhaving withdrawn, Jim stands face to face with his Amelia. Her features are all alight with pleasure, but her first words are not particularly amorous.
"Would you mind coming into the dining-room? Sybilla is in the drawing-room already this morning. She said she was afraid it was going to be one of her bad days, so I thought" (rather regretfully) "that possibly she would be a little later than usual in coming down; but, on the contrary, she is much earlier."
It is possible that an extremely ardent love may be independent of surroundings; may burn with as fierce a flame, when its owner or victim is seated on a hard horsehair chair beside a dining-room table, in a little dull hotel back room, as when the senses are courted by softly-cushioned lounges, penetrating flower-scents, and cunningly arrangedbric-à-brac; but perhaps Jim's passion is not of this intense and Spartan quality. At all events a chill steals over him as Amelia leads the way into that small and uncheerful chamber where the Wilson family daily banquet. He is not so lost to all sense of what England and Amelia expect of him as not to take her in his arms and kiss her very kindly and warmly, before they sit down on two hard chairs side by side; and even when they have done so, he still holds her hand, and kisses it now and then. He has a great many things to say to her, but "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh" is not invariably true. Sometimes that very abundance clogs the utterance, and, after a ten months' separation, the hinges of even lovers' tongues are apt at first to be somewhat rusty.
"And are you really glad to see me again?" asks the woman—she is scarcely a girl, having the doubtful advantage of being her betrothed's senior by two years. The horsehair chairs are obviously powerless to take the edge off her bliss; and she can scarcely command her voice as she asks the question.
"I decline to answer all such futile inquiries," replies he, smiling not unkindly; but there is no tremor in his voice. "Even if I did not discourage them on principle, I should have no time to answer them to-day; I have so much to say to you that I do not know where to begin."
"After ten months that is not very surprising," rejoins she, with a stifled sigh. There is no sentimental reproach in her words or tone; but in both lurks a note of wistfulness which gives his conscience a prick.
"Of course not! of course not!" he rejoins hastily; "but it is not really ten months—no, surely——"
"Ten months, one week, two days, four hours and a half!"
Against such exactitude of memory what appeal has he? He attempts none, and only thinks with a faint unjust irritation that she might have spared him the odd hours.
"And how are things going? How are you all getting on?" he asks, precipitating himself upon a fresh subject, since he feels prevented by circumstances from saying anything likely to bring him much distinction upon the old one. "Your father?"
"His throat is better"—with an accent of hesitating filial piety, as if there were something else about him that was not better.
"And Sybilla?"
"Oh, poor Sybilla! she has her bad days now and then."
"And, like the early Christians, she resolves to have all things in common. I expect that her family have their bad days too," says Jim dryly.
"Well, we do sometimes," replies Amelia with reluctant admission; "but she really does try to control herself, poor thing; she is hardly ever unbearable now."
"And Cecilia?"
"She is rather in trouble just now; I fear there is no doubt that the man she was engaged to has thrown her over. You never saw him? Oh no! Of course, the affair came on after you left England."
Burgoyne's eyebrows have gone up, and his face has assumed an expression less of surprise than admiration at this piece of news.
"How many does that make? Four? Well, courage! There is luck in odd numbers; perhaps she will land the fifth."
"She will tell you about it herself," says Amelia; "she tells everybody; she likes talking about it—it is very odd, but she does. When you throw me over"—rubbing his hand which she holds, with shy and deprecating caressingness, against her own cheek—"I shall tell nobody; I shall keep my misfortune very dark."
"When I do!" repeats he with laughing emphasis; but to his own ear both the emphasis and the laughter sound flat. This is perhaps the cause why he, a second time, runs away from his subject; or, more probably, he is really in haste to get to the new one. "Meanwhile," he says, his eyes involuntarily dropping to the carpet, as if he had rather not see the effect of his words upon her; "meanwhile, someone has thrown me over."
"You?"
"Yes, me; I did not write it to you, because I do not see much use in putting down bad news in black and white, and even with this little delay, I am afraid," with a dry smile, "that you will have plenty of time to enjoy it."
He pauses for an instant, and she does not hurry him with any teasing questions; but waits, with meek patience, till he feels inclined to go on.
"My aunt is going to be married."
If he has wished that his news shall produce the effect of a torpedo, he has no cause to complain of his want of success. His placid Amelia vaults to her feet.
"Married!" she repeats with a gasp. "Why, she is quite, quite old!"
"She is sixty-five!"
The colour has flooded all Amelia's face; the blazing colour that means not pleasure, but consternation. It is some moments before she can frame her next query.
"And is he?—do you?—has she chosen wisely, I mean?"
Jim laughs again.
"Can one choose wisely at sixty-five? Well, whether she has or no is a matter of opinion; she has chosen the curate of the parish, who, by reason of his extreme juvenility, is still in deacon's orders."
Miss Wilson's limbs are shaking so that she cannot maintain her standing attitude. She sinks down by the dining-table again in her hard chair. It is a very hard chair on which to receive such ill news.
"And cannot you hinder it, cannot you dissuade her?" she asks falteringly.
"I shall not try; poor old woman! After all, she has a right to pursue her own happiness in her own way, only I wish that she had made up her mind twenty years ago; though, to be sure, how could she?"—with another smile—"since, at that time, her bridegroom was not much more than born."
A dead silence supervenes—a silence of shocked stupefaction on the one side, of rather dismal brooding on the other. At length Amelia nerves herself to put a question upon which it seems to her, not very incorrectly, that her whole future hangs. She does it in such a low voice that none but very sharp ears could have caught it. Jim's ears are so; practised as they are in listening for the stealthy tread of wild animals, and for the indescribable sounds of mountain solitudes at night.
"Will it—will it—make a great difference to you?"
Burgoyne lifts his eyes, which have been idly bent on the floor, and looks straight and full at her across the corner of the table.
"It will make all the difference!" he answers slowly.
Poor Amelia is holding her handkerchief in her hand. She lifts it to her mouth and bites a corner of it to hide the quivering of her lips and chin. She does not wish to add to his pain by any breakdown on her own part. But Jim divines the quivering even under the morsel of cambric, and looks away again.
"Her money is almost entirely in her own power," he continues, in an unemotional voice; "and when she announced her marriage to me, she also announced her intention of settling the whole of it upon her—her"—he pauses a second, as if resolved to keep out of his voice the accent of satire and bitterness that pierces through its calm—"her husband."
Amelia has dropped both shielding hand and handkerchief into her lap. She has forgotten her effort to conceal the blankness of her dismay. Unless she conceals the whole of her face, indeed, the attempt would be in vain, since each feature speaks it equally.
"Her whole fortune?" she repeats, almost inaudibly. "All?"
"What, all my pretty chickens and their dam?"
"What, all my pretty chickens and their dam?"
says Jim, oppressed by her overwhelmed look into an artificial and dreary levity, and in not particularly apt quotation. "My dear, do not look so broken-hearted. I am not absolutely destitute; I need not become a sandwich man. I have still got my £800 a year, my very own, which neither man nor mouse, neither curate nor vicar, can take from me. I can still go on rioting upon that; the question is"—his words coming more slowly, and his tone growing graver—"have I any right to ask you to riot on it too?"
Her hand has gone in feverish haste out to his for answer, and her eyes, into which the tears are welling, look with an intense dumb wistfulness into his; but, for the moment, it remains dumb. There is something painful to Burgoyne in that wistfulness, almost more painful than the telling of that news which has produced it. He looks down upon the tablecloth, and, with his disengaged hand, the one not imprisoned in his betrothed's fond hold, draws patterns with a paper-knife accidentally left there.
"The one thing that I blame her for," he continues, not following up the branch of the subject that his last speech had begun to open up, and speaking with a composure which, to the stricken Amelia, appears to evidence his attainment of the highest pinnacle of manly fortitude, "the only thing I blame her for, is her having hindered my adopting any profession. Poor old woman, it was not malice prepense, I know; she had not seen her Jessamey then, probably had not even a prophetic instinct of him, but as things turned out"—stifling a sigh—"it would have been kinder to have put me in the way of earning my own living."
Amelia's head has sunk down upon his hand—he feels her hot tears upon it; but now that the theme has no longer reference to herself, she can speak. She straightens herself, and there is a flash, such as he has very seldom seen there, in her rather colourless orbs.
"It was monstrous of her!" she cries, with the almost exaggerated passion of a usually very self-controlled person. "After having always told you that you were to be her heir!"
"Buthadshe told me so?" replies Jim, passing his hand with a perplexed air over his own face. "That is what I have been trying to recall for the last few days. I never remember the time when I did not believe it, so I suppose that someone must have told me so; but I could not swear that she herself had ever put it down in black and white. However," tossing his head back with a gesture as of one who throws off his shoulders a useless burden, "what does that matter now? I am not her heir, I am nobody's heir; we must look facts in the face! Amelia, dear"—in a tone of reluctant tender affection, as of one compelled, yet most unwilling, to give a little child, or some other soft, helpless creature, pain—"we must look facts in the face!" There is something in his voice that makes Amelia's heart stand still; but she attempts no interruption.
"It is very hard for me, dear, after all these"—he pauses a second; he is about to say "weary years' waiting," but his conscience arrests him; to him they have not been weary, so, after a hardly-perceptible break, he goes on—"after all these many years' waiting, to have come to this, is not it?"
He had not calculated on the effect which would be produced by his melancholy words and his caressing tone. She buries her face on his shoulder, sobbing uncontrollably.
"They were not long!" she murmurs brokenly. "Nothing is, nothing can be, long to me as long as I have you, or the hope of you!"
It is, perhaps, fortunate for Amelia that she cannot see the expression of the face which looks out above her prostrate head into space, with a blankness equal to what has been her own, a blankness streaked, as hers was not, with remorse. He would give anything to be able to answer her in her own key, to tell her that, as long as he can keep her, the going or coming of any lesser good hurts him as little as the brushing past his cheek of a summer moth or windblown feather. But when he tries to frame a sentence of this kind, his tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth. He can only hold her to him in an affectionate clasp, whose dumbness he hopes that she attributes to silencing emotion. She herself indulges in no very prolonged manifestation of her passion. In a few moments she is again sitting up beside him with wiped eyes, none the handsomer, poor soul, for having cried, and listening with a deep attention to an exposition of her lover's position and prospects, which he is at no pains to tinge with a factitious rose colour.
"Have you realized," he says, "that I shall never be better off than I am now? never!never!For though of course I shall try to get work, one knows how successful that quest generally is in the case of a man with no special aptitudes, no technical training, and who starts in the race handicapped by being ten years too late!"
But the dismalness of this panorama raises no answering gloom in the young woman's face. She nods her head gently.
"I realize it."
"And this is what I have brought you to, after all these years' waiting," he continues, in a tone of profound regret. "All I can offer you at the end of them is a not particularly genteel poverty, not even a cottage with a double coach-house!"—laughing grimly.
"I do not want a double coach-house, nor even a single one!" replies Amelia stoutly, and laughing too, a little, through returning tears. "Do not you know that I had rather drive a costermonger's barrow with you than go in a coach and six without you!"
This is the highest flight of imagination of which Jim has ever known his matter-of-fact Amelia guilty, and he can pay her his thanks for it only in compunctious kisses. Perhaps it is they, perhaps it is the thought which dictates her next hesitating speech, that bring a light into Amelia's tear-reddened eyes.
"If you will never be better off——" She stops.
"Yes, dear, go on; 'if I shall never be better off'—I certainly never shall; I feel sure that you will be able to put my earnings for the next ten years into your eye, and see none the worse for them!"
"If—you—will—never—be—better—off——" she repeats again, more slowly, and breaking off at the same place.
"Well, dear?"
"If you will never be better off"—this time she finishes her sentence; but it is rendered almost inaudible by the fact of her flushed face and quivering lips being pressed against his breast—"why should we wait any longer?"
Why should we wait any longer?To most persons, granted the usual condition of feeling of a betrothed couple, this would seem a very natural and legitimate deduction from the premises; but, strange to say, it comes upon Burgoyne with the shock of a surprise. He has been thinking vaguely of his change of fortune as a cause for unlimited delay, perhaps for the rupture of his engagement, never as a reason for its immediate fulfilment.
He gives a sort of breathless gasp, which is happily too low for Amelia with her still hidden face to hear. To be married at once! To sit down for all time to Amelia and £800 a year! To forego for ever the thrilling wandering life; the nights under the northern stars, the stealthy tracking of shy forest creatures; the scarce coarse delicious food, the cold, the fatigue, the hourly peril, that, since its probable loss is ever in sight, make life so sweetly worth having—all, in short, that goes to make up so many an Englishman's ideal of felicity; that has certainly hitherto gone to make up Jim's. To renounce it all! There is no doubt that the bitterness of this thought comes first; but presently, supplanting it, chasing it away, there follows another, a self-reproachful light flashing over his past eight years, showing him his own selfishness colossal and complete for the first time. In a paroxysm of remorse, he has lifted Amelia's face, and, framing it with his hands, looks searchingly into it.
"I believe," he says in a shaken voice, "that you would have married me eight years ago, on my pittance, if I had asked you!"
No "Yes" was ever written in larger print than that which he read in her patient pale eyes. Even at this instant there darts across him a wish that they were not quite so pale, but he detests himself for it.
"And I never suspected it!" he cries compunctiously. "I give you my word of honour, I never suspected it! I thought you looked upon my poverty in as prohibitory a light as I did myself."
"I do not call it such great poverty," replies Amelia, her practical mind resuming its habitual sway over her emotions. "Of course, it is an income that would require a little management; but if we cut our coat according to our cloth, and did not want to move about too much, we might live either in a not very fashionable part of London, or in some cheap district in the country very comfortably."
Despite his remorse, a cold shiver runs down Burgoyne's spine at the picture that rises, conjured up with too much distinctness by her words, before his mind's eyes; the picture of a snug Bayswater villa, with a picturesque parlour-maid, or the alternative cottage in some dreary Wiltshire or Dorsetshire village, with a shrubbery of three aucuba bushes, and a kitchen-garden of half an acre. It may be that, her frame being in such close proximity to his, she feels the influence of his shiver, and that it suggests her next sentence, which is in a less sanguine key.
"But it would not be fair; it would be asking you to give up too much."
The meek abnegation of her rather worn voice brings his remorse uppermost again on the revolving wheel of his feelings.
"Is not it my turn to give up something?" he asks tenderly; "and besides, it is time for me to settle! I am—I am tired of wandering!"
As this atrocious lie passes his lips, he catches his breath. Tired of the Sierras! Tired of the bivouacs among the dazzling snow! Tired of the august silence of the ever-lasting hills! Heaven forgive him for saying so! Perhaps there is no great air of veracity in his assertion, for she looks at him distrustfully; so distrustfully that he reshapes his phrase: "At least, if I am not, I ought to be!"
But still she gazes at him with a wistful and doubting intentness.
"If I could only believe that that was true!"
"It is true," replies he, evading her look; "at least, true enough for all working purposes; we all know that life is a series of compromises, a balancing of gain and loss. I shall lose something, I do not deny that, but I gain more—I gainyou!"
"That is such a mighty gain, is it not?" she says with a melancholy smile, as that intuition of the truth which sometimes comes to unloved or tepidly loved women flashes upon her.
"A matter of taste—a mere matter of taste!" rejoins he hurriedly; aware of the unreal ring in his own words, and trying, with all his might, to feel as well as speak light-heartedly.
She shakes her head in a way which tells him how poorly he has succeeded. In a desperate if not very well-judged attempt to convince her of his sincerity, his next speech is uttered.
"Why should not we be married at once? to-morrow? the day after to-morrow? at the Consulate—of course thereisa Consulate—or the English church; I suppose there are half a dozen English churches. Why not? We have nothing to wait for, and we are both of age!"
He has had no unkindly intention in the last words, but the moment that these are out of his mouth, a glance at Amelia's unblooming face and unyouthful figure tell him that they were not happily chosen. At the first instant that the suggestion of an immediate marriage reaches the hearer's brain, it sends a dart of joy over her features. To be married at once! To put an end for ever to the interminable waiting, to enter at last—at last upon the possession of the so long deferred Canaan. But in a second, that first bright flash is chased away, and gives place to a look of almost humiliation.
"You must be making fun of me, to suggest such a thing!" she says in a wounded voice; "you know how wildly impossible it would be that I should leave them all—my father—Sybilla—without any preparation."
"Without any preparation!" replies Jim, raising his eyebrows. "Have not you been preparing them for the last eight years?"
He feels a vague unjust irritation with her for opposing his proposition, though deep down in his heart he knows that he would have felt a much greater annoyance had she eagerly closed with it. As she does not answer a question, which the moment that it is uttered he feels to have been rather brutal, he goes on, against his will, in the same sarcastic key:
"I am afraid that you will have to leave them all some day; I am afraid that our Bayswater mansion—by-the-bye, I am sure it will not be a mansion, for I am sure it will not have a back-door—will not be likely to contain all. Your father—Sybilla—Sybilla and her physic bottles take up a good deal of room, do not they?"
It is fortunate for Amelia that she is too preoccupied by the thought of her own next speech to take in the full acerbity of the last remark.
"If you would consent to wait till we get home—father does not mean to stay in Italy beyond the end of next month—we might be married in June; that" (with a pink flush of happiness) "would not be so long to wait."
In a second a sum of the simplest description executes itself in Burgoyne's head. It is now the second week of April; they are to be married in June, he has then eight weeks left. It shocks himself to find that this is the way in which he puts it. All the overt action that he permits himself, however, is to say with a shrug:
"As you will, then, as you will!" adding, since he feels that there is something discourteous even to unchivalry in so bald an acquiescence in his prospective bliss, "Of course, dear, the sooner I get you the better for me!"
No lover could have been overheard giving utterance to a more proper or suitable sentiment; so that it is lucky that this is just the moment that Cecilia chooses for entering.
"Do not be afraid," she says, with a laugh. "I will not stay a minute, but I just wanted to say 'How do you do?' How well you are looking! and how young!"—with an involuntary glance of comparison from him to her sister; a glance of which they are both rather painfully conscious. "Ah!" (sighing) "with all your Rocky Mountain experiences, it is evident that you have been having an easier time than we have!"
"Are you alluding to Sybilla?" asks Jim gravely. "I have no doubt, from what I know of her powers in that line, that she has been extremely trying."
"Yes, partly," replies the girl doubtfully; "but I have had troubles of my own too. I dare say that Amelia has told you, or probably" (with a second and heavier sigh) "you have been more pleasantly employed."
"Amelia did hint at some disaster," replies Jim, struggling to conceal the rather grim smile which is curving his mouth, a feat the more difficult since he has no moustache to aid him; "but I have been waiting to hear all the details from yourself."
"I know that you are apt to think I fancy things," says Cecilia, sitting down on a third hard chair, "but there could be no fancy in this case; I am sure I was as much engaged as any girl ever was. I had chosen the drawing-room paper and bought the dining-room grate!"
"That is further than we ever got, is not it, Amelia?" says Jim, breaking, at the relation of this prosaic fact, into the laugh he has been with difficulty swallowing; "but, Cis, if I were you, I should keep the grate; one does not know how soon its services may be required again!"
"It is all very well for you to joke," returns Cecilia, with an offended air; "it may be play to you, but it is——"
"Not death, not quite death to you!" interrupts Burgoyne, glancing with an expressive smile at her buxom outline. "I think you will live to fight another day, will not you? But I really am extremely sorry; tell me all about it."
"He was perfectly right when we left England," says Cecilia, mollified at once, and apparently relieved by the invitation to unbosom herself of her woes; "nobody could have been more so; he came to see us off at Folkestone, and the tears were in his eyes; they were really, it was not my imagination, was it, Amelia? And at first he wrote all right, and said all the usual things; but then his letters gradually grew fewer and fewer, and after I had written and telegraphed a great many times—I do not know how many times I did not telegraph to ask whether he was ill, and you know how expensive foreign telegrams are—he sent me a few lines, oh, such cruel lines, were not they, Amelia? to say that, on reflection, he feared that the feeling he had for me was not such as to justify his entering on so sacred an engagement as marriage with me; but he ought to have thought of that before, ought not he?"
"Undoubtedly!"
"I will never engage myself to a clergyman again," says Cecilia pensively.
Burgoyne's thoughts have strayed at the mention of the cloth of his sister-in-law elect's truant admirer, to that member of the same profession who has lately robbed him of his heritage, and he replies with a good deal of feeling:
"They do play one dirty turns now and then, do not they? Yes, Cis, stick to laymen for the future!"
Cecilia receives this counsel with a melancholy sigh, fixing her large eyes on the carpet, but presently resumes the conversation in a livelier key.
"Let us talk about something pleasanter," she says. "Had you a good journey? Do you like your travelling companion? Why did not you bring him with you? Is he nice?"
"At all events, he is not a clergyman," replies Jim, with a rather malicious smile; "but no, my dear, do not let your thoughts turn in that direction! You must look at him as poor women look at diamonds!"
"I am sure I do not know what you mean!" replies Cecilia, reddening. "I have not the slightest wish to look at him! I am not in spirits to 'look,' as you call it, at anyone!"
A moment later, she adds, with a suspicion of malice in her tone:
"We are certainly an unlucky family in our loves! I, heartlessly thrown over, and Amelia engaged for eight years!"
Burgoyne smiles. "Amelia is not going to be engaged any longer," he says, putting his arm round his betrothed. "Amelia is going to be married at once!"
It would seem natural that, after so long a separation, Burgoyne should dine and spend the evening with his betrothed; but such is not the case. For this, however, he is not to blame; he is quite prepared to stay with her until she turns him out. Had he not better school himself to domestic habits, since he is so soon to assume them for life? But in consideration for Sybilla he is dismissed undined. It is not that she ever shares the family dinner at their tableà partin thesalle à manger, but the thought of their entertaining a guest with a conviviality far greater in her imagination than would be the case in reality, while she herself lies lonely on her couch of suffering, preys upon her spirits so much that her family have to abandon the idea. So, towards sunset, Jim is dismissed. He has no opportunity for any parting endearments to his lady-love, as the whole family are in the room, and it is Cecilia, not Amelia, who volunteers to walk across the hotel courtyard with him, for the advantage of a last word. What that last word is he is not slow to learn.
"You will take us some excursions, will not you?" she says, with a persuasive air, putting her arm through his. "Father is so unenterprising, we have really seen scarcely anything; but you will take us some excursions now, will not you?"
"Are you sure that your spirits are equal to them?" inquires Burgoyne unkindly.
"I do not know about that, I am sure," replies she, growing pink at his tone; "but one must make an exertion sometime, and I think a little distraction would do me good, and so I am sure it would to poor Amelia!"
"Poor Amelia will shortly have the distraction of being married," rejoins the young man, who feels as if he could not repeat the statement of this fact too often to himself and others.
"And I think it would be only civil," continues Cecilia persistently, "in fact, I do not see how you could avoid it, if you invited your friend to join us."
But Jim escapes without having committed himself to this promise, and wanders about the town in the lovely, lowering light; finds himself on the Lung Arno, strolling along with the leisurely loiterers, among whom, for every two soft Tuscan voices, there is a loud metallic Anglo-Saxon one. He watches the carriages rolling back from their drive on the Cascine; the river falling over the weir; the river yellow as Tiber yesterday, and to day shot with blue and green and silver, as it tumbles with a pleasant noise. The houses on either side of the Arno, the domes and roofs, are all clothed in a strange serenity of yellow light; a golden air so transparent and line and crystal clear, so free from the soft blur of mist—lovely too—through which we see objects in our wet green home, that Jim feels as if he could stretch out his hand and touch the hill that backs gold towers and bridges, and see whether it really is made out of one whole amethyst, as it looks. The beauty of the world has always been very much to Burgoyne, though hitherto it has been chiefly in the austerity of her high and desert places that he has bowed the knee before the Universal Mother. This little gold evening city, sunset clad in the colours of the New Jerusalem, lifting her heavenly campanile to as heavenly a sky, is to him a new and wonderful thing. Her loveliness sinks into his soul, and with it a companion sadness as deep. From henceforth the sight of earth's fair shows will be, for the most part, forbidden him. He has always loved to look and adore in silence and alone; henceforth he will never have the right to be alone; henceforth he will never have the right to go anywhere without his wife. Strange and terrible word to which he tries in vain to accustom his mental ears; and, thanks to the narrowness of their means, neither of them will be able to stir from the strait precincts of their pinched home.
He comes back to his hotel, through the Piazza of the Duomo. All the infinite richness of cupola and arch, high up, are still wrapped in the fiery rose cloak of sunset, while below the body of the great church, with all its marbles and traceries and carved wonders, is clad in the sobriety of twilight.
On reaching the Minerva, he finds that Byng has not yet returned, or rather that he has been in and gone out again. He waits dinner half-an-hour for him, and then dines without him; dines in solitude, since it is not till his cup of coffee is before him, and his cigarette between his lips, that his young friend appears. It is evidently no unpleasant errand that has detained him, for he arrives beaming, and too excited even to perceive themenuwhich a waiter offers him.
"They have arrived!" he cries. Oddly enough it never occurs to Burgoyne to inquire who "they" may be; it seems as much a matter-of-course to him as to the handsome pink and white boy before him, that the pronoun must relate to Elizabeth Le Marchant and her mother.
His only answer, however, is an "Oh!" whose tone is rather more eagerly interested than he could have wished.
"I thought that they could not stay more than another day in Genoa," continues Byng, at length becoming aware of themenuat his elbow; but only to wave it impatiently away. "So I thought I would just run down to the station to meet the evening train, the one we came by last night; however, it must have been more punctual than yesterday, for before I reached the station, I met them; I mean they passed me in a fiacre. I only caught a glimpse of her face, but I saw her hand; it was lying on the carriage door like a snow-flake."
"Like my grandmother!" cries Burgoyne in a rage, for which he cannot quite account to himself, at this ingenious and novel simile.
Byng laughs; the laugh of a thoroughly sweet-natured person, who, in addition, has some special cause for good-humour.
"I do not know what colour your grandmother was; but she must have been very unlike most people's if she was like a snow-flake."
Jim's cross mouth unbends into a reluctant smile. It is not the first time that he has discovered how useless, and also impossible, it is to be out of humour with Byng.
"I had a good mind to tell my fiacre man to follow them," continued Byng, in an excited voice; "but, in the first place, I did not know how to say it—really, Jim, we must get up a little of the lingo—and, in the second place, I thought it would perhaps be rather too much in the private detective line."
"I think it would have been extremely ungentlemanlike!" rejoins Jim severely.
Byng reddens; but still without losing his temper.
"That is coming it rather strong, is not it? but anyhow, I did not do it." And then, by tacit agreement, they both drop the subject.
During the next three or four days it is not named between them, nor indeed do they see much of each other. Burgoyne spends the greater part of his days with Amelia. Whatever cause for the accusation he may have given during the previous eight years, nobody can say that he neglects her now. He passes long hours at her side, on the same hard chair that had supported him on their first interview, in the little dismal dining-room; going into calculations of house-rent and taxes, drawing up lists of necessary furniture. He even makes a bid for Cecilia's drawing-room grate; but that young lady, whose forecasting mind can look beyond present grief to future sunshine, refuses to part with it. The lovers are not always, however, studying Maple's and Oetzmann's lists. Sometimes Jim varies the diversion by taking his future wife to picture-galleries and churches, to the Uffizi, the Accademia, San Lorenzo. It is doubtful whether Amelia enjoys these excursions as much as she does the selection of bedsteads and saucepans, her pleasure being in some degree marred by a feverish anxiety to say what she thinks her lover expects of her as they stand before each immortal canvas. In her heart she thinks the great statues in the Medici Chapel frightful, a heresy in which she is kept in countenance by no less a light than George Eliot, who in one of her letters dares to say of them, "they remained to us as affected and exaggerated in the original, as in copies and casts." To Amelia many of the frescoes appear lamentably washed out, nor are her efforts to hide these sentiments attended with any conspicuous success, since nothing is more hopeless than for one utterly destitute of a feeling for works of art to feign it, without having the imposture at once detected.
Burgoyne's mind during these expeditions is a battle-ground for pity and rage; pity at the pathos of his poor love's endeavours; rage at their glaring failure. Cecilia sometimes accompanies the lovers, but this does not make matters much better. Cecilia devotes but a very cursory notice to the pictures; her attention being almost wholly centred on the visitors, and on finding resemblances for them among the inhabitants of her own village at home, for the accuracy of which she appeals at every moment to her sister. Every day she asks Burgoyne to fulfil his promise—a promise which he as punctually assures her that he never made—to introduce his friend to her. He has a strangely strong reluctance to comply with this simple request, which yet, he knows, will have to be complied with some day. When Amelia is his wife, Byng will have to know Cecilia, for she will probably spend a great deal of her time with them—make their house a second home, in fact.
And meanwhile Jim is keenly, and for some reason sorely, conscious of the fact that, during the hours in which he is stooping his weary head over catalogues of fenders and fire-irons, carving-knives and fish-slices, blankets and ticking, Byng is searching Florence through her length and breadth for their two countrywomen. It is not indeed necessary to credit his friend with any special quest to account for his wanderings through the "adorable little city," as Henry James most truly calls it, since he is a young man of a wide and alert curiosity, with a large appetite for pleasure both intellectual and the reverse. Jim, whose acquaintance with him has chiefly been with his rowdy undergraduate side, bear-fighting, and proctor-defying, is astonished at his almost tremulous appreciation of the Ghirlandajos, the Lorenzo di Credis, the Giottos, that in a hundred chapels, from a hundred walls, shine down in their mixed glory of naïve piety and blinding colour upon him.
One day the elder man is sitting in his bedroom with a despatch-box and a sheet of paper before him. He is embarked upon a dreary calculation as to what his guns will fetch. He has made up his mind to sell them. Of what further use can they be to him? He will not be allowed to shoot at the Bayswater omnibuses, which will be the only game henceforth within his reach. While he is thus employed upon an occupation akin to, and about as cheerful as, that of Rawdon Crawley before Waterloo, Byng enters.
"You look as if you had a headache, old chap," he says, sitting down upon his friend's bed.
"If you had been going through as many kitchen-ranges as I have this morning, perhaps you would have a headache," replies Jim gravely. "You know that I am going to be married as soon as I get home."
Byng nods; and Burgoyne, while inwardly blessing the tact that spares him any congratulations, takes himself to task for having made the announcement so lugubriously as to render felicitation obviously inapplicable.
"When are you going to introduce me to Miss Wilson?" asks Byng presently. "If you shirk it much longer, I shall think that you are ashamed of me."
Jim glances affectionately, yet not quite comfortably, at his young friend, and the thought dashes across his mind that, in his last remark, the latter has put the saddle on the wrong horse.
"You have so large an acquaintance in Florence already," he says, with some stiffness, "that I did not know that you would care to add to it."
"One cannot have too much of a good thing," replies the other joyously. "You know I love my fellow-creatures; and in this case," he adds civilly, "I do care very much."
Burgoyne's eyes are bent on the paper before him, which contains the melancholy enumeration of his firearms—"A 500 double-barrelled express, by Henry, of Edinburgh; a 450 single-barrelled ditto, by same maker," etc., etc.—as he says slowly:
"I shall be very happy."
His acceptance of the proposition can hardly be called eager; but of this Byng appears unawares.
"When shall it be, then? To-day—this afternoon?"
"No-o-o; not to-day, I think. It has been arranged that we are to go to San Miniato—Amelia, her sister, and I."
"Three of you?" cries Byng, raising his eyebrows. "Then why not four? Why may not I come too?"
There being, in point of fact, no reason why he should not, and Cecilia's morning prayer being still ringing in her future brother-in-law's ears, he gives a dull and lagging assent; so that at about three o'clock the two men present themselves at the door of the Wilsons' apartment at the Anglo-Américain Hotel. That Sybilla is not expecting visitors is evident by the fact that, at the moment of their entrance, she is taking her own temperature—a very favourite relaxation of hers—with a clinical thermometer. She removes the instrument from her mouth without indecent haste, and holds out a languid white hand to Byng.
"So you are going off on a long afternoon's pleasuring?" she says, with a pathetic smile. "I am so glad that neither of my sisters is going to stay at home with me. We invalids must guard against growing selfish, though I think that is perhaps more the danger withmalades imaginaires; we real ones have learnt our lesson of suffering better, I hope."
"You do not look so very ill," replies Byng, in his sympathetic voice, letting his eyes rest caressingly on the prostrate figure, which has yet no smallest sign of emaciation about it.
"Ah, that is because of my colour," replies Sybilla, with an animation slightly tinged with resentment. "You, too, fall into that common error. My London doctor tells me that there is no such unerring indication of radical delicacy of constitution as a fixed pink colour like mine; the more feverish I am, the deeper it grows. It is very hard"—smiling again sadly—"for one gets no pity!"
"Where is Cecilia?" cries Jim brusquely, and fidgeting in his chair. "Why is not she ready?"
As he speaks, the young lady in question enters—so obviously arrayed for conquest, in so patently new a hat, and such immaculate pale gloves, that across Burgoyne's mind there flashes, in vexed mirth, the recollection of the immortal caution addressed by Major O'Dowd to his friend and comrade, "Moind your oi, Dob, my boy!" Would he not do well to repeat it to his friend?
They are off now, there being nothing further to retard them, leaving Sybillatête-à-têtewith her thermometer. They are off, sociably packed in one fiacre—