"Four precious souls, and all agogTo dash thro' thick and thin."
"Four precious souls, and all agogTo dash thro' thick and thin."
Not, indeed, that there is much dash about the Florentine cab-horses—saddest among God's many sad creatures—with not a sound leg among them, with staring coats and starting ribs, and poor broken knees; and with their sadness emphasized by the feathers stuck in their tired heads, as if to mock their wretchedness by a sort of melancholy smartness! Sad as they are, it must be owned that they are the only sad things in the cheerful Florentine streets, where no one seems over-busy, where, out of the deep-eaved, green-shuttered houses, people lean, talking to acquaintances on the shadowed pavement below. All the narrow thorough-fares are full of bustling life; but there is no haggard squalor apparently, no dreadful gin-palace gaiety. It does not follow here that a man must be drunk because he sings. And down the strait, colourful streets one looks—down a vista of houses diversely tall, each with its cream-yellow face and its green shutters, varied here and there by the towering bulk of some giant-blocked mountain-palace, through whose grim, barred windows a woman peeps, or a little dog shows his pointed nose—looks to where, in dwindling perspective, the view is closed by a narrow picture of lucent purple hill, Fiesole or Bellosguardo—names to which the tongue cleaves lovingly. Through the gay streets, over bridge and blue Arno, our travellers go; their driver cracking a prodigious whip, and with a tiny red dog, absurdly shaven, and with nothing but a small woolly head and tail left of the original design, seated gravely beside him. Away they go, pleasuring; but pleasure and pleasuring are not always identical.
Burgoyne sits opposite Amelia; and as for Cecilia, it is to be supposed that her heartache is for the moment dulled, since the same carriage-rug covers her knees and those of Byng. Burgoyne does not look at Amelia; nor, though his eyes are fixed upon the passing objects, does he at first see aught of them. His vision is turned inwards, and to his own soul he is mechanically repeating in dismal recitative, "A double-barrelled, central fire, breech-loading gun, by Lancaster; made strong enough at the breech to shoot a spherical bullet."
As for Amelia, her features are not of a build to express any emotion with much brilliancy; but over them lies a deep and brooding content. Amelia has not had much undiluted happiness in her life, but she is exceedingly happy to-day. She is even strangely free from the carking fear which usually assails her, of praising mistakenly, of being enthusiastic in the wrong places, and passing over the right ones unnoticed. If she keep to a vague generality of handsome adjectives, she will surely do well enough, and, on this high holiday that her heart is holding, he cannot be cross to her.
As to Byng, he is emphatically of the school of divinity taught by Tommy Moore, nor was he ever known, when lacking "the lips that he loved," to fail to make love to "the lips that are near." His taste is too good for him to have chosen Cecilia as a companion; but, since fate has allotted her to him for the afternoon, he finds no difficulty in making the best of her. Nor, to do her justice, is she destitute of charms of a certain kind, though her face has the inevitable air of commonness incident upon a very short nose and a very long upper lip. But she has a good deal of bloom, and of crisp, showy-coloured hair, and a very considerable eye-power. Byng's attachment to the fair sex being of far too stout a quality to be blunted by such trifles as an inch too much or too little of nose or lip, he also, like Amelia, is thoroughly prepared to enjoy himself.
Up the turning Via Galileo they climb, to the Basilica at the top—stock-drive of all tourists—hackneyed as only Yankeedom and Cockneydom, rushing hand in hand through all earth's sacredness, can hackney. But even hackneying is powerless to take off the freshness to the eye that sees it for the first time, of that view when he beholds the Lily City lying close at his feet, so close that it seems he could throw a stone into her Arno.
They have left their fiacre, and, as naturally happens in apartie carrée—more especially when one couple are betrothed lovers—have broken into pairs. Burgoyne leans pensively on the terrace parapet, and his sombre eyes rest on the band of sister hills, joining hands in perpetual watch round valley and town; hills over which, in this late spring, there is more a promise than a performance of that green and many-coloured wealth of verdure and blossom that one associates with Firenze's fair name. But it is a promise that is plainly on the verge of a bounteous fulfilment. Then his look drops slowly to the city herself. In what a little space comparatively does the Florence that is immortal lie! The Duomo, the lily Campanile "made up of dew and sunshine," the Baptistery, Santa Croce, the Palazzo Vecchio; he could compass them in a ten minutes' walk. And around this small nucleus of the undying dead and their work, what a nation of gleaming villas of the polyglot living—a nation of every tongue, and people, and language! All over the hills is the sheen of white walls, the verdure of tended gardens; they stretch away almost to where the Apennines raise their cold white fronts against the sky.
He rouses himself to remember that Amelia is beside him, and that he ought to say something to her. So he makes a ratherbanalobservation upon the smallness of theenceintethat encloses so much loveliness.
"Yes, is not it tiny?" replies she, with the eager pleasure of having a remark made to her which she cannot go wrong in answering. "Think of London! Why, the whole thing is not as big as South Kensington or Bayswater!"
He shudders. Must the accursed suburb pursue him even here?
"Let us go into the church," he says, in a tone that a little dulls his companion's buoyancy.
She follows him crestfallenly, asking herself whether she has answered amiss here also. She does not trust herself to any comment upon the interior.
Byng and Cecilia are standing before the high altar, from over which a mosaic Madonna stiffly beams upon them; and as the other couple approach them, Burgoyne hears the words "drawing-room grate" issue from his future sister-in-law's lips.
"Bravo, Cis!" he says in a dry aside; "you are getting on nicely! I did not think that you would have reached the drawing-room grate till to-morrow."
To avoid intruding further on her delicate confidences, and also to escape from two Americans, who are nasally twanging Hare and Horner at each other, varied by trips into Baedeker, he passes into a side chapel made famous by one of the loveliest tombs that ever feigned to simulate in marble death's ugliness. The Yankee voices are high and shrill, but they had need to be higher and shriller still before they could break the slumber of him whose resting-place Jim has invaded in his flight from Cecilia and New York. Was ever rest so beautiful as this of the young sleeper? A priest he was, nay cardinal, and youthful and lovely and chaste! and now in how divine a slumber is he lapt! But how should that four hundred years' slumber not be divine, watched by such a gentle Mary-mother as is watching his; smiling as if to tell him that he does well to sleep, that sleep is better than waking, that death is better than life! There is a sunken look about his fair eyelids, as if he had gone through suffering to his rest; and his reposeful hands are thin; but below him, as he lies in his spotless marble tranquillity, upon his sarcophagus, the rose garlands wave in lovely frieze, and the riotous horses rear and plunge in fulness of life.
Burgoyne has not perceived that Amelia did not follow him. She has, in point of fact, remained in the body of the church, immersed in her guide-book, steadily working through the marble screen and pulpit, and still five good minutes off the side chapel, in which her lover stands in so deeply brown a study, that he is not aware of the intrusion upon his solitude of two women, until he is roused with a leap by the voice of one of them addressing—not him, of whose presence she is obviously as unaware as was he of hers, until this moment—but her companion.
"Oh, mother! am I not a fool, at my age, too? but I cannot help it, it makes me cry so!"
Burgoyne does not need the evidence of his eyes. His ears and his startled heart have enough assured him whose are the tears called forth by that indeed most touching effigy at which he himself has been so pensively staring.
The mother's answer is inaudible; and then again comes the voice of Elizabeth Le Marchant, tearful and vibrating.
"You know I have seen so few beautiful things in my life, I shall get used to them presently; it is only sheer happiness that makes me——"
She stops abruptly, having evidently discovered for herself, or been made aware by her mother of his vicinity; and even if she had not done so, he feels that he must lose no time in announcing himself.
"Florence is a place that does make one often choky," he says, eagerly taking the hand which she hesitatingly, and with some confusion, offers him.
It is not quite true; Florence has never made him feel choky; and, if he is experiencing that sensation now, it is certainly not the dead cardinal of Portugal who is giving it to him.
"I am a fool, a perfect fool!" replies Elizabeth, hastily and shamefacedly wiping away her tears.
To give her time to recover herself, and also because he has not yet greeted the girl's mother, Jim turns to her.
"Did not I tell you that we should meet here?"
There is such undisguised joy and triumph in his tone, that perhaps Mrs. Le Marchant has not the heart to dash his elation; at all events, he is conscious in her tone of a less resolute determination to keep him at arm's-length, than on their two last meetings.
"I do not think that I contradicted you," she answers, smiling.
He may steal another look at Elizabeth now. She is not crying any longer. Indeed, despite the real moisture on her cheeks, she strikes him as looking happier than at their last meeting; and though the interval between now and then is too short for any such alteration to have taken place in reality, yet he cannot help imagining that the hollows in those very cheeks are less deep than when they stood together before the great Vandyke in the Brignoli Sala Palace.
"And theentresol? is it all your fancy painted it?" he asks quickly, feeling a sort of panic fear, that if he stops putting questions for one minute they will slip out of his grasp again, as they did in the Genoese Palace.
Elizabeth's face breaks into a soft bright smile. She has a dimple in one cheek and not in the other. She must have had it ten years ago; how comes he to have forgotten so sweet and strange a peculiarity?
"It is delightful—perfectly delightful!"
"Large enough to receive your friends in, after all?"
But the moment that the words are out of his mouth, he perceives that he has made a false step, and is somehow treading dangerous ground. Elizabeth's smile goes out, like a light blown into nothingness by a sudden wind.
"We have not many friends," she murmurs; "we—we are not going out at all."
He hastens to change his cue.
"Byng and I are at the Minerva," he says, beginning to talk very fast; "I wonder if, by any chance, you are in our neighbourhood; have I forgotten, or did you never tell me where theentresollies? Where is it, by-the-bye?"
Ensnared by the wily and brazen suddenness of this demand, Miss Le Marchant has evidently no evasion ready, and, after an almost imperceptible pause of hesitation, answers:
"We are at 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio."
She is looking doubtfully and half uneasily in his face, as she gives this answer, but he has scarcely time for a flash of self-congratulation at having obtained the information, which he had never realized the eagerness of his desire for until this moment, before he becomes aware that his interlocutor's eyes are no longer meeting his, but have wandered to some object over his shoulder. What that object is he is not long left in doubt. Whether it is a genuine accident, or one of those spurious ones, of which those who profit by them are the artificers, Jim does not know; and, as he is at the time, and will be when he thinks of the circumstance to the end of his life, too angry to question Byng on the subject, it is pretty certain that he neverwillknow; but so it is that at this moment the voice of hisprotégébreaks upon his ear:
"You are not going to give us the slip like this, old chap—oh! I beg your pardon!"
But begging pardon ever so sweetly does not alter the fact that he has rushed, like a bull in a china shop, into the middle of the dialogue. All four look at each other for a second; then, since there is no help for it, Jim presents his disciple, and the next moment the latter has slid into talk with Elizabeth, and she is responding with an ease and freedom from embarrassment such as had never marked her sparse and hardly won utterances to the elder man.
Byng has the advantage of him, as he somewhat bitterly thinks. Byng has no connection with "old times;" those poor old times which she and her mother have so unaccountably takenen grippe. He seems suddenly relegated, as by some natural affinity, to the mother. On their two last meetings the eagerness to converse has been all on his side; yet now he has nothing to say to her. It is she who addresses him.
"I hope that you found your young lady flourishing," she says civilly.
He gives a slight inward start, though—as he is thankful to feel—his body is quiet. "His young lady!" Yes, of course he has a young lady! Has there been any danger during the last five minutes of his forgetting that fact? and has Mrs. Le Marchant done him an unnecessary service in recalling it?
"Oh, yes, thanks, she is all right!"
"Is she still in Florence?"
"Yes, she is here; by-the-bye"—looking round with a sudden sense that he ought to have missed her—"what has become of her? Oh, here she is!"
For even while the words are on his lips, Amelia and Cecilia come into sight. Amelia with a shut Baedeker, and the serene look of an easy conscience and a thoroughly performed duty on her amiable face; Cecilia with a something of search and disquiet in her large rolling eye, which would have made him laugh at another time.
A sudden instinct, with which his will has nothing to do, makes him flash a look back at Mrs. Le Marchant, as if to gauge the effect produced upon her by his betrothed; and, following her glance, he finds that it is resting on Cecilia. She thinks that he is engaged to Cecilia. The mistake is intolerable to him, and yet a second's reflection tells him that it is a natural one. In a second he sees his Amelia as she presents herself to a strange eye. Miss Wilson is only thirty-one, but upon her has already come that set solid look of middle age, which overtakes some women before they are well over the borders of youth, and which other women manage to stave off till they are within near hail of forty. Yes; the mistake is quite a natural one. Most people would suppose that the showy Cecilia, still fairly youthful, and with so many obvious and well-produced "points," must be his choice; and yet, as I have said, the idea that anyone should credit him with her ownership is intolerable to him.
"Here she is!" he cries precipitately. "The one to the right side, the other is her sister; may I—may I present them to you?"
Perhaps it is his irritated fancy that dictates the idea, but it seems to him as if he detected a sort of surprise in Mrs. Le Marchant's face, when he effects the introduction he has proposed, and to which she accedes courteously, after a pause of hesitation about as long as had followed his inquiry of Elizabeth as to their address.
Five minutes later they have all sauntered out again on the terrace, and Burgoyne is again leaning on the wall; but this time he has no fear of hearing of Bayswater, for it is Elizabeth who is beside him. Since last he looked at it half an hour ago, a sort of glorification has passed over the divine view. Down where the river twists through the plain country, there is a light, dainty mist, but the mountains have put on their fullest glory. They are not green, or brown, or purple, or blue; but clad in that ineffable raiment woven by the sun, that defies our weak vocabulary to provide it with a name. A little snow-chain lies on the sun-warmed neck of Morello, and along the tops of the further Apennines, right against the acute blue of the heavens, lies a line of snow, that looks like a fleece-soft cloud resting from its journeyings on their crests; but it is no cloud, nor is there any speck upon the gigantic complete arch that over-vaults town and valley and radiant mountains. In the folds of these last, the shadows slumber; but over all the city is the great gold glory of spring. The one thing in Florence that frowns among so many smiles is the scowling Pitti, and that, from here, is invisible. Nearer to him, against the azure, stand the solemn flame-shaped cypresses arow, and beside them—as unlike as life to death—a band of quivering poplars, a sort of transparent gold-green in their young spring livery. The air is so clear that one can go nigh to counting the marbles on the Duomo walls. In a more transparent amber light, fuller of joy and gaiety, cannot the saved be dancing around, as in Fra Angelico's divine picture? cannot they be walking in the New Jerusalem of St. John's great dream? Only in the New Jerusalem there are no galled and trembling-kneed fiacre horses.
Elizabeth is sitting on the wall, her light figure—is it possible that it has been in the world only four years less than Amelia's solid one?—half-supported by one small gray hand outspread on the stone; her little fine features all tremulous with emotion, and half a tear gathered again in each sweet eye. As Jim looks at her, a sort of cold covetous gripe pinches his heart.
"What a woman with whom to look at all earth's loveliness—with whom to converse without speech!"
Even as he so thinks, she turns her head towards him, and, drawing in her breath with a long low sigh, says:
"Oh, how glad I am I did not die before to-day!"
Her eyes are turned towards him, and yet, as once before, he realizes that it is not to him that either her look or her thoughts are directed. Both are aimed at an object over his shoulder, and, as before, that object is Byng. Byng, too, has been gazing at the view. There are tears in Byng's eyes also. Stevenson says that some women like a man who cries. Byng cries easily and genuinely, and enjoys it; and, as he is a remarkably fine young man, there is something piquant in the contrast between his wet blue orbs and his shoulders.
As Burgoyne rolls home that afternoon in his fiacre, as before, placed opposite Amelia, his mental vision is no longer fixed upon a "double-barrelled, central fire, breech-loading gun;" it is fixed with a teasing tenacity upon the figure of a smallish woman, perennially looking, through brilliant tears, over his shoulder at somebody else.
"Was it 12, or 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio?"
There are no tears in Byng's eyes as he asks this question next morning—asks it of his friend, as the latter sits in the Fumoir, with an English paper in his hands, and a good cigar between his clean-shaven lips. It has struck him several times lately that he will have to give up good cigars, and take to a churchwarden pipe and shag instead. But, so far, the churchwarden and the shag remain in the future.
"12, or 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio?" inquires Byng.
"Waswhat12 or 12 bis?" replies his friend, with a somewhat obviously intentional obtuseness; but Byng is far too thoroughly healthy and happy a young animal this morning to take offence easily.
"I mean Miss Le Marchant's address," he answers, explaining as amiably as if he had not been perfectly aware that it was only "cussedness" that had dictated the query.
There is a slight pause. Burgoyne would like to answer that he does not remember—would like still more to answer that he does not see what business it can be of Byng's; but, since he is not destitute of common-sense, a second's reflection shows him that he has no good reason for either the lie or the incivility, so he replies, pretty calmly, with his eyes still on his leading article:
"I believe Miss Le Marchant said 12 bis."
Having obtained the information he wanted, and finding his companion not conversationally disposed, Byng is moving away again, when he is arrested by Jim's voice, adding to the intelligence he has just given the monosyllable:
"Why?"
"Why what?" asks Byng, returning readily, and laughingly mimicking the intentional obtuseness so lately practised on himself by the other.
"Why did you ask?"
"I am thinking of paying my respects there this afternoon, and I did not want to ring at the wrong bell."
A short silence. Jim's head is partly hidden by hisGalignani.
"Did Miss or Mrs. Le Marchant ask you to call?"
Byng laughs.
"Both of them are as innocent of it as the babe unborn!"
"You asked yourself then?" (in a snubbing voice).
Byng nods.
"And she said yes?"
The plural pronoun has dropped out of sight, but neither of them perceives it. The younger man shakes his sleek head. Jim lays down his paper with an air of decision.
"If she did not say 'Yes'—if she said 'No,'" he begins, with an accent of severity, "I fail to understand——"
"She did not say 'No,'" interrupts Byng, still half laughing, and yet reddening as well. "She began to say it; but I suppose that I looked so broken-hearted—I am sure I felt it—that she stopped."
As Jim makes no rejoinder, he continues by-and-by:
"After all, she can but send me away. One is always being sent away" (Jim wishes he could think this truer than he does); "but now and again one is not sent, and those are the times that pay for the others! I'll risk it."
There is a hopeful ring in his voice as he ends, and again a pause comes, broken a third time by the younger man.
"Come now, Jim"—looking with a straight and disarming good humour into his friend's overcast countenance—"speak up! Do you know of any cause or impediment why I should not?"
Thus handsomely and fairly appealed to, Burgoyne, who is by nature a just man, begins to put his conscience through her paces as to the real source of his dislike to the idea of his companion's taking advantage of that introduction which he himself has been the means—however unwillingly—of procuring for him. It is true that Byng's mother had adjured him, with tears in her eyes, to preserve her boy from undesirable acquaintances; but can he, Burgoyne, honestly say that he looks upon Elizabeth Le Marchant as an undesirable acquaintance for anyone? The result of his investigations is the discovery of how infinitesimal a share in his motives regard for his young friend's welfare has had. The discovery is no sooner made than he acts upon it.
"My dear boy," he says—and to his credit says it heartily—"I see no earthly reason why you should not go; you could not make nicer friends."
"Then why will not you come too?" asks Byng, with boyish generosity.
The other shakes his head. "They had much rather I stayed away; they have taken meen grippe."
"Pooh! Nonsense! You fancy it."
"I think not"—speaking slowly and thoughtfully—"I am not a fanciful person, nor apt to imagine that my acquaintances bother their heads about me one way or another; but when people try their best, in the first instance, to avoid recognising you at all, and on every subsequent occasion endeavour to disappear as soon as you come in sight, it is not a very forced assumption that they are not exactly greedy for your society."
This reasoning is so close that Byng is for the moment silenced; and it is the other who shortly resumes:
"I think it is because I remind them of the past; they have evidently some unpleasant association of ideas with that past. I wonder what it is."
The latter clause is addressed more to himself than to Byng.
"Perhaps some of them have died, or come to grief, and they are afraid of your asking after them," suggests the younger man.
"On the contrary—they are all—one more flourishing than another."
"Well, I would give them one more trial, anyhow; I am sure they would come round. Give them time, and I am sure they would come round!" cries Byng sanguinely; adding, "What could have been pleasanter than Mrs. Le Marchant's manner when you presented her to Miss Wilson?"
The mention of Miss Wilson recalls to Jim the extremely unpleasant moment of that presentation, thus brought back to him—the moment when Amelia had looked so middle-aged, and Cecilia so flashy; recalls to him also the conviction that has been growing upon him since yesterday, of the more than wisdom, the absolute imperative duty on his part, of avoiding a repetition of that comparison which had forced itself upon his notice in the church of San Miniato.
"You had better come," persists Byng still, like a magnanimous child, holding out half his cake to his friend; whether, like the same child, with a semi-hope that it may be refused, or whether, on the other hand, it may have crossed his mind that, where there are two visitees, the chances of atête-à-têteare improved by there being also two visitors.
"My dear boy," returns Jim, this time with a testiness handsomely streaked with irony, "you are really too obliging; but, even if I wished it—which I do not—or even iftheywished it—which they donot—it is in this case quite impossible, as I am engaged to go shopping with Amelia."
Probably the blow is not a knockdown one to Byng; at all events, he bears the rebuff with his habitual healthy good temper, and goes off to put on a smarter tie. Burgoyne, thinking no such improvement in his toilette necessary, strolls away to the Anglo-Américain. It is true that he has covenanted to escort Amelia to the shop for Cantagalli ware, though there is no particular reason why, had he so wished it, the purchase of the dinner-service that is to grace their Bayswater symposia might not have been deferred for twenty-four hours; and indeed, as things turn out, it has to be so deferred.
As he opens the door of the Wilson sitting-room his future father-in-law brushes past him, with evident signs of discomposure all over his clerical figure and spectacled face; and, on entering, he finds equal, if not superior, marks of upset equanimity on the countenances of the three women that are the room's occupants. Over the wood fire—Sybilla alternately roasts and freezes her family, and this is one of her roasting days—Cecilia is stooping, in evident search for some object that has been committed, or tried to be committed, to the flames. The other two are looking on with an air of vexed interest. Sybilla is the first to address him.
"You have appeared at a not very happy moment," she says, with a sigh; "we have been having a family breeze; it has sent my temperature up nicely! It is 100, 100, Point 2."
The mention of Sybilla's temperature is always enough to put Jim in a rage. It is therefore in no very feeling tone that he returns:
"If it were 1,000, Point 99, I should not be surprised, in this atmosphere! Good Heavens, Cis, are not you hot enough already?"
The young lady thus apostrophised rises, with some precipitation, and with a very heated complexion, from her knees, holding in her hand, however, the object of her quest—a rather charred small parcel, done up in white paper, and with a fragment of white ribbon still adhering here and there to it.
"Father behaves so childishly," she says, with irritated undutifulness.
"You must own that it was enough to provoke him," strikes in Amelia's mild voice.
"What was enough to provoke him? How has he shown his childishness? For Heaven's sake, some of you explain!" cries Jim impatiently, looking from one to the other.
But with this request none of the three appears in any hurry to comply. There is a distinct pause before Cecilia, seeing neither of her seniors shows any signs of relieving her of the burden of explanation, takes that burden upon herself.
"The fact is," she says, setting her little rescued packet on the table beside her, and beginning to fan herself, "that Mr. Dashwood, the man to whom I was engaged, has chosen to marry. I am sure"—with a shrug—"no one has the least desire to deny his perfect right to do so; and this morning there arrived by post a bit of his wedding-cake! I suppose he meant it civilly; but father chose to take it as an insult to himself, and though it was addressed to me, he threw it into the fire. I am very fond of wedding-cake; so, as soon as father's back was turned, I fished it out again!"
Jim laughs, with more vigour perhaps than heartfelt amusement.
"Bravo, Cis! You are a real philosopher! We might all learn a lesson from you."
"What have you done with your nice friend?" asked Sybilla languidly. "Amelia, dear, thiscouvre-piedis slipping off me again. What a sympathetic voice he has! I am sure he has been a great deal with sick people."
"I left him putting on his best tie to go out calling. No, calm yourself, Cecilia, not on you; it is not your turn to-day."
"Whose turn is it then?" asks the girl, with an interest not at all blunted by the mortifying incident of the cake, which, indeed, she has begun to nibble with apparent relish.
Jim hesitates a second—a second during which it strikes him with a shock that he already finds a difficulty in pronouncing Elizabeth Le Marchant's name. He manages to evade the necessity even now by a circumlocution.
"I believe it is the Piazza d'Azeglio upon which that luminary is to shine."
"Is he going to see that lovely creature to whom you introduced me yesterday?" cries Amelia, with good-natured enthusiasm. "I heard her telling him that she lived in the Piazza d'Azeglio. Oh, Jim, how pretty she is! One ought to pay for being allowed to look at her."
Many women, whose plainness is incontestable, are able to be just to their better favoured sisters; but Amelia is more than just—she is lavishly generous.
Burgoyne rewards her with an affectionate look—a look such as would make her swear that, beside Miss Le Marchant, as beside Dumain's fair love,
"Juno but an Ethiop were!"
"Juno but an Ethiop were!"
"She looks as if she had had a history; that always improves a woman's appearance," says Cecilia pensively, holding a fragment of the fateful cake suspended in air, and regarding it with a melancholy eye. "Has she?"
"I never asked her."
"Why did not you go too?" inquires Amelia, judiciously striking in, as is her habit, as often as she perceives that her younger sister is beginning to get too obviously upon her ownfiancé'snerves; a catastrophe which something in the tone of his last remark tells her—though she does not quite understand why it should—is imminent. "They are old friends of yours, are not they? They may be hurt if they find that a perfect stranger like Mr. Byng is in a greater hurry to visit them than you are."
Before Burgoyne's mental vision rises a picture of Elizabeth's heavenly eye wandering indifferently over the dear old friend's shoulder to find its home in that of the perfect stranger. But he says kindly, and even playfully:
"Why did not I go too? Because I was under the impression that I was engaged to go with another lovely being to choose crockery, was I not? Am I not?"
Amelia's answer is conveyed by a series of nods and winks executed behind her sisters' backs, which he presently understands to imply that she desires a private interview. It is not immediately that he grasps what she is driving at, since dumb-show is often puzzling to the person at whom it is aimed, though clear as day to the dumb-shower. As soon, however, as he masters what her wish is, he hastens to comply with it; and five minutes later finds themtête-à-têtein the hideous little dining-room which had been the scene of their reunion, and of many after-meetings.
"I could not say so, of course, beforeher," remarks Miss Wilson, as soon as they are out of earshot, "or she might have insisted upon my going. She is very unselfish sometimes; but the fact is, I do not think I ought to leave Sybilla again to-day. You see, she was alone the whole of yesterday afternoon; and when we came back we found her in a very low way. She had been reading her book of prescriptions—you know the book; all the prescriptions which she has had for the last ten years bound up together—and we rather dread her bringing it out, as she always fancies that she is going to have the disease prescribed for."
"Humph!"
"And, after all, happiness ought not to make one selfish, ought it?" says Amelia, with a gentle sigh of abnegation, as she ruffles her pale-haired head against his coat-sleeve. "I have so much of you now—oh, so much!—not to speak of——"
"Cecilia, of course, is incapacitated by grief?" interrupts Jim brusquely. "She will be going up and down upon the mountains like another unfortunate fair one. But your father? He will be at home, will he not?"
"Yes, he will be at home," replies Amelia, slowly and doubtfully, as if not finding a very satisfactory solution in this suggested arrangement; "but, as you know, it never answers to leave father and Sybilla alone together for long. You see, he does not believe that there is anything the matter with her; he thinks that she is as well as you or I" (a gush of warm feeling towards his father-in-law rushes over Jim's heart); "and though he tries to prevent himself from showing it to her, yet I am afraid, poor dear, that he is not very successful."
Jim laughs.
"And to-day," continues Amelia, "he is naturally a good deal upset about Cecilia and that wedding-cake; itwasvery impertinent to send it—was not it?—though she does not seem to see it. I hope"—with a wistful smile, and a repetition of the fond friction of her head against his sleeve—"that whenyouthrowmeover——"
This is a hypothesis, suggested with perhaps unwise frequency by poor Miss Wilson, which never fails to exasperate Jim.
"If we are going to talk nonsense," he breaks in brusquely, and with no attempt to return or reward her caressing gesture, "I may as well go."
"Go to the Piazza d'Azeglio," says she coaxingly, her spirits raised by the harshness of tone of his interruption of her speech, and half persuading herself that it owes its birth to the supposition being too painful to be faced by him.
He looks at her strangely for a moment, then—"Why do you wish me to go to the Piazza d'Azeglio?" he asks, in a tone that is no longer overtly cross, only constrained and odd. "Why are you driving me there?"
"Because I think you would like it," she answers; "because"—taking his hand and passing her lips, which he feels to be trembling a little, very gently over the back of it—"because all through your life I want you to have exactly what you like, always."
He draws his hand away; not unkindly, but as if shocked at the humility of her action.
"That is so likely," he says mournfully.
There is no particular mirth in Burgoyne's mind as he mounts the stone stairs of the house which announces itself as 12 bis, in the commonplace new square of the Piazza d'Azeglio. But yet it is evident that, if he wishes to be in tune with the mood of the family to whom he is going to pay his respects, he must be not only mirthful, but musical. As the door of theentresol, to which he is directed by the porter, opens in answer to his ring, bursts of laughter, among which he can plainly detect the voice of Byng, assail his ear, mingled with music, or rather noise of a sort, but what sort his ear, without fuller evidence than is yet before it, is unable to decide. The person who has admitted him is an elderly Englishwoman, whose features at once strike him as familiar—so familiar that it needs scarcely one reaching back of memory's hand to capture the fact of her having filled the office of nurse at the Moat, at the period when the nursery there had been the scene of those frantic romps in which he himself had taken a prominent part, and in which Elizabeth had been to him by turns so able a second, or so vigorous an adversary. He would like to claim acquaintance with her, and, perhaps, if she had made any difficulty as to admitting him, might have screwed up his courage to do so; but as she lets him in without delay or hesitation, he follows her in silence along the passage of a by no means imposing littleentresol—they are not so well off as they used to be, is his passing thought—is ushered into a small sitting-room, and, entering behind his own name, which has been completely drowned by the din issuing from within, has time, before the consciousness of his own appearance has disturbed it, to take in the details of a group which his entry naturally breaks up. Set slantwise across one angle of the room is an open cottage-piano, and beside it stands Elizabeth, her elbow resting on the top, and all her pensive face convulsed with helpless laughter. Upon the music-stool is seated a large collie dog, supported from behind in an upright position by Byng. Before him is a score of music, from which he is obviously supposed to be playing, as indeed he is doing in a sense—that is to say, he is bringing down first one large paw and then another heavily on the keys, accompanying each crash with a short howl to express the agony inflicted upon his nerves by his own performance. The scene is so entirely different a one from what he had expected: the immoderately laughing Elizabeth has so much more kinship with the sweet hoyden of the Moat than with the pale woman with a history of his two last meetings, that for a second or two Burgoyne stands in the doorway as if stunned. It is not till Mrs. Le Marchant, coming out of an inner room, advances to greet him, that he recovers himself.
"How do you do?" she says, smiling, and with less constraint than he has of late learnt to expect. "Are you fond of music?" (putting, as she speaks, her hands up to her ears). "I hope so! Did you ever hear such a shocking noise?"
"I do not know which I admire most, the vocal or the instrumental part of the performance," replies he, laughing; but even as he speaks both cease.
Elizabeth lifts her elbow from the piano, and Byng removes his hands from under the dog's arms, who at once, joyful and released, jumps down, upsetting his music-stool with the impetus of his descent, and yet immediately, with all a dog's real good-heartedness, begins to swing a handsome tail, to show that he bears no real malice for the odious practical joke that has been played upon him. The clamorous fall of dog and music-stool reveals an object which had been hidden behind both, in the shape of a little boy, in whose behalf, as it darts across Jim's mind, the eccentric concert, for which he has come in, must have been got up.
"Oh,dogo on!" cries the child shrilly. "Oh,domake him do it again! Oh, why do you stop?"
And indeed through the whole of the ensuing conversation this cry recurs at short intervals with the iteration of a guinea-hen. But none of the three performers seems disposed to comply with this request. Two of them sit down decorously on chairs, and the third throws himself upon the floor panting, showing a fine red tongue, and dragging himself luxuriously along on his stomach to show his relief at hiscorvéebeing ended. The child has followed Elizabeth, and now stands beside her, tiresomely pulling at her white hands.
"Bertie has come to spend the day with us," she says, looking explanatorily up at Jim, but speaking with a formality very different, as he feels, from the exuberant ease and mirth that had marked her intercourse with Byng.
Jim had already had a flash of speculation about the child, as to whether he might be a late-come little brother, arrived on the scene at a period subsequent to his own connection with the family; since plainly the span of his small life did not stretch to a decade.
"Bertie is a new friend," he says kindly. "I do not know Bertie."
"His mother, Mrs. Roche, is a cousin of ours; she has a villa on Bellosguardo. Perhaps you know her?"
"I am going to a party at her house on Wednesday," cries Jim, in a tone of eager pleasure at the discovery of this fresh link, and of the vista of probable meetings which it opens up. "I shall meet you there?"
Elizabeth turns her head slightly aside and shakes it as slightly.
"No?"
"We are not going out."
The formula implies mourning, and yet the clothes both of Elizabeth and her mother are unmistakably coloured ones, and give no indication of an even moderately recent loss. But it is so clear that Miss Le Marchant means to add no explanation that he has to change the subject.
"Though Bertie is not an old friend," he says, smiling, "yet I have come across one here to-day—she opened the door to me; I should have liked to shake hands with her, only she looked so haughty—she never used to look haughty at the Moat."
"Do you mean nurse?" she asks.
"Yes, I knew her in an instant; she is not in the least changed, less even"—hesitating a little, as if doubtful whether the stiffness of their new relations warranted a personality—"less even than you."
She snatches a hasty look at him, a look upon which he sees, to his surprise, imprinted a character of almost fear.
"You must be laughing at me," she says, in a voice in which he detects an undoubted tremor; "I am very much changed."
There is such obvious apprehension in her whole manner, that his one thought—after a first flash of astonishment—is to reassure her.
"Of course I was only speaking of externals," he says quickly; "ten years could hardly be expected to leave any of us quite where we were as to our inner selves;" then, seeing her still look flurried, and becoming himself nervous, he adds, rather stupidly, the hackneyed Swinburnian couplet—
"'Time turns the old days to derision,Our loves into corpses or wives!'
"'Time turns the old days to derision,Our loves into corpses or wives!'
though I never could see that that was quite a necessary alternative!"
Ere the words are out of his mouth she has risen with precipitation, and begun hurriedly to re-arrange the branches of lilac in a scaldino on the table near her. She is apparently so awkward about it that one odorous white bough falls out on the floor. Before Jim can stoop to pick it up, Byng has rushed to the rescue. In eagerly thanking him, in receiving it back from him, and accepting his services in replacing it among its perfumed brothers, the girl, perhaps involuntarily, turns her back upon her former interlocutor, who sits for a moment staring rather blankly at her, and wondering what sting there could have lurked in his apparently harmless words to drive her away so abruptly. Whatever may have driven her away, there is certainly no doubt as to her being gone. Nor as Jim sees her moving about the room, followed by Byng, and showing him her treasures—the little wild red and yellow tulips she plucked in the field this morning; the chicken-skin box she bought at Ciampolini's yesterday, and mixing all that she shows with her delicate light laughter—can he buoy himself up with any reasonable hope of her ever, with her own good will, returning. He must be looking more blank than he is conscious of, for Mrs. Le Marchant's voice sounds quite apologetic in his ears, when, having been, like himself, deserted by her companion, she takes a seat near him.
"Elizabeth is so proud of her bargains," she says, glancing with a lenient smile towards her daughter; "she must show them to everybody."
"She never offered to show them to me," replies Jim, rather morosely; then, becoming aware of the almost puerile jealousy evidenced by his last remark, he adds:
"I am afraid I said something that annoyed Miss Le Marchant; I cannot think what it could have been. I told her how wonderfully little changed I thought her in the last ten years; but it could not have been that, could it?"
The mother's eye is still following her child, and, if it were not an absurd assumption, Burgoyne could have fancied that there was a sudden moisture in it.
"She is very sensitive," Mrs. Le Marchant answers slowly; "perhaps it would be safer not to say anything about herself to her."
"Perhaps it would be safer," rejoins Jim, with some ill-humour, "if you were to draw up a list of subjects for me to avoid; I have no wish to play the part of bull in a china shop; and yet I seem to be always doing it; imprimis" (striking the forefinger of his left hand with the right), "imprimis the Moat."
He pauses, as if expecting a disclaimer, but none such comes—"The past generally" (moving on to the second finger and again halting; but with no more result than before). "Yourselves" (reaching the third finger). Still that silence, which, if it mean anything, must mean assent. He looks impatiently in her face, to seek the response which her lips refuse him.
"On your own showing," she says gently, though in a rather troubled voice, "you have the whole field of the present and the future left you; are not they wide enough for you?"
His brows draw together into a painful frown.
"Perhaps I have as little cause to be fond of them as you have of the past."
It is a random shot, a bow drawn at a venture; but it could not have hit more true apparently had it been levelled with the nicest aim.
As her daughter had done before her, Mrs. Le Marchant rises hastily, and leaves him—leaves him to reflect ironically upon how wisely Amelia had acted in insisting upon his visiting these "dear old friends," upon whom the effect of his conversation is so obviously exhilarating.
"I wish I had not come; I wish it was time to go home!"
The small fractious voice that wails the two preceding sentences seems to be Jim's own mouthpiece. It is, in point of fact, the voice of Bertie, who, tired of uttering his unregarded request for the repetition of the concert which had filled him with such delight, has of late been trying the effect of his unassisted powers to bring about the desired consummation, by putting his arms as far as he can round the dog's body, and endeavouring to lug him towards the music-stool. The collie has been enduring this treatment for five minutes—enduring it with an expression of magnanimous patience, which seems to say, that, though it is undoubtedly an unpleasant experience, yet, as it is inflicted upon him by one of his own family, he must of course put up with it, when Elizabeth goes to the rescue. Elizabeth goes alone, since Byng is held in converse by her mother at the other side of the room. Verbal persuasions having entirely failed, she tries to loosen the child's arms; but his grasp, though puny, is obstinate, and the only perceptible result of her endeavours is the utterance by her young friend of the two polite aspirations above recorded.
"He does not want to sing any more to-day," Jim hears her saying in her gentle voice; "you really are hurting him; he is too polite to say so; but you are squeezing him so tight that you reallyarehurting him. Why now" (with a little accent of pain), "you are hurtingme."
Jim has been looking with a lack-lustre eye out of the open window at the young plane trees exchanging their frowsy buds for infant leaves; at the one Judas tree pranking in its purple blossoms in the Piazza; but at that low complaint he makes one step across the room, and, whipping off Master Bertie alike from long-enduring dog and plaintive woman, stoops over the latter as she sits upon the floor, passing one hand over the other, upon which the child's angry fingers, transferred from his first victim, have left rosy prints of pain.
"I wish I had not come; I wish it was time to go home!" whimpers the little boy.
"Since he is so anxious to go home, I will take him, if you like," says Jim in a stiff voice; "I must be going myself."
She looks up at him from her lowly posture, a charming, half-apologetic, wholly peace-making smile fleeting across her small face, while she still chafes her hand—that little pinched hand which makes him feel so ridiculously tender.
"Are you, too, sorry that you came?" she asks.
The question takes him by surprise. He is not prepared for so friendly and almost intimate a sequel to her short, shy answers, and her abrupt quitting of him. He hesitates how to answer it; and as he hesitates, she rises and stands beside him. It is not easy for a grown person to rise gracefully from a seat on the floor. Jim catches himself thinking with what a roll and a flounder Cecilia would have executed the same manœuvre; but Elizabeth, supple and light, rises as smoothly as an exhalation from a summer meadow.
"If I was rude to you just now," she says, rather tremulously; "if I am ever rude to you in the future, I hope you will understand—I hope you will put it down to the fact that I—I—am very ignorant of—that I know very little of the world."
The two men are gone; so is the child; so is the dog; and Elizabeth is shutting up the piano and removing the score.
"What a noise we made!" she says, smiling at the recollection.
"If you make such a shocking noise again, the signora and the other lodgers will infallibly interfere."
Mrs. Le Marchant has followed her daughter, and now throws one arm about her slight neck, with a gesture of passionate affection.
"If you knew," she says, in a voice of deep and happy agitation, "what it was to me to hear you laugh as you did to-day!"
"I have a good many arrears in that way to make up, have not I, mammy? And so have you too," answers the younger woman, laying her sleek head down caressingly on her mother's shoulder; then, in a changed and restless voice: "Oh, if we could stop that man talking about the Moat! Why does he go on hammering about it?"
"Why indeed?" replies Mrs. Le Marchant with a shrug. "Men are so thick-skinned; but it is rather touching, his having remembered us all these years, is not it? For my part, I had almost entirely forgotten his existence—had not you?"
"Absolutely!" replies Elizabeth, with emphasis; "and if he will only let me, I am more than willing to forget it over again. Oh, mammy" (turning her face round, and burying it on her mother's breast), "why can't we forget everything? begin everything afresh from now—this delightfulnow?"
A reconciliation is seldom effected without some price being paid for it. Jim's with Elizabeth, if it can be called such, is bought at the cost of a small sacrifice of principle on his part. No later than this morning he had laid it down as a Median rule that he should avoid opportunities of finding himself in Miss Le Marchant's company; and yet, not only has he spent the major part of the afternoon in her society, but, as he walks away from her door, he finds that he has engaged himself to help Byng, on no distant day, in doing the honours of the Certosa Monastery to her and her mother. On reflection, he cannot quite explain to himself how the arrangement has come about. The proposal certainly did not originate with him, and still less with the two ladies so strangely shy of all society. The three have somehow been swept into it by Byng, who, either with the noblest altruism, or because he feels justly confident that he has no cause for jealousy of his friend (Jim's cynical reflection is that the latter is the much more probable reason), has insisted on drawing him into the project.
Jim Burgoyne is not a man whom, as a rule, it is easy either to wile or cudgel into any course that does not recommend itself to his own judgment or taste—a fact of which he himself is perfectly aware, and which makes him remorsefully acknowledge that there must indeed have been a traitor in the citadel of his own heart before he could have so weakly yielded at the first push to what his reason sincerely disapproves. But yet it is not true that remorse is the leading feature of his thoughts, as he walks silently beside his friend down the Via di Servi. It ought to be, perhaps; but it is not. The picture that holds the foreground of his memory is that of Elizabeth sitting on the floor, and sending him peace-offerings from her pathetic eyes and across her sensitive lips. It was very sweet of her to think it necessary to make him amends at all for her trifling incivility, and nothing could be sweeter than the manner of it. How gladly would he buy some little rudeness from her every day at such a price! But yet, as he thinks it over, the manner of it, the ground on which she rested her excuse, is surely a strange one. That she should attribute her light lapse from courtesy to want of knowledge of the world comes strangely from the mouth of a woman of six-and-twenty. If it be true—and there was a naïve veracity in lip and eye as she spoke—how is it to be accounted for? Has her mind, has her experience of life, remained absolutely stationary during the last ten years? Her tell-tale face, over which some pensive story is so plainly written, forbids the inference. It is no business of his, of course. Amelia, thank Heaven! has no story; but, oh! if someone would tell him what that history is! And yet, three days later, he voluntarily puts away from himself the opportunity of hearing it.
During those three days he sees no more of her. He does not again seek her out, and accident does not throw her in his way. He buys his Cantagalli dinner-service in company with Amelia; chooses the soup-tureen out of which he is to ladle mutton broth for the inhabitants of Westbourne Grove; he tastes of the wedding-cake that has cost Cecilia so dear, and he avoids Byng. On the third day he can no longer avoid him, since he is to occupy, as on the San Miniato occasion, the fourth seat in the fiacre which conveys himself and the Misses Wilson to the garden-party at the villa in Bellosguardo inhabited by Mrs. Roche, the mother of the amiable Bertie. The Wilsons' acquaintances in Florence are few, and, as far as Burgoyne has at present had the opportunity of judging, evil. It is, therefore, with a proportionate elation that Cecilia dresses for a party at which she will meet the bulk, or at least the cream, of the English society. It is to Byng's good nature that she and her sister owe the introduction to a hostess whose acquaintance is already too large to make her eager for any causeless addition to it; but whose hand has been forced by Byng, in the mistaken idea that he is doing a service to his friend Jim.
They are late in setting off, as Amelia is delayed by the necessity of soothing Sybilla, who has been reduced to bitter tears by atête-à-têtewith her father, in which that well-intentioned but incautious gentleman has been betrayed into suggesting to her that she may possibly be suffering from biliousness. The administering of bromide, to calm her nerves under such a shock; the reiterated assurances that every member of the family except its head realizes the monstrosity of the suggestion, take up so much time that Amelia herself has to reduce to a minimum the moments allotted to her own toilette. She has cried a little with Sybilla, for company partly, and partly out of weariness of spirit. That and hurry have swollen her eyelids, and painted her cheeks with a hard, tired red, so that it is an even more homespun figure and a homelier face than usual, that seat themselves opposite Burgoyne, when at length they get under weigh.
He, Burgoyne, has been impatient of the delay, impatient to set off and to arrive; yet he would be puzzled to say why. He knows, on no less authority than her own word, that he shall not meet Elizabeth; and yet the mere feeling that the mistress of the house to which he is going is of the same blood as she; that he shall see the rude, spoilt child, whose ill-tempered pinch made her utter that low cry of pain, suffice to give a tartness to his tone, as he inquires the cause of her lagging, of the panting, flushed, apologetic Amelia. Byng and Cecilia have been sitting waiting for some time in thesalon, from which Sybilla has removed her prostrate figure and tear-stained face; but they have been entertaining each other so well—she in paying him a series of marked attentions, and he in civilly and pleasantly accepting them—that the half-hour has not seemed long to either. But the party, in motion at last, has passed the Roman Gate, and is climbing up and up between the high walls, each step giving it a greater vantage ground over the Flower City, before Burgoyne recovers his equanimity.
The spring comes on apace. In the gardens above their heads laurestinus bushes, with all their flowers out (as they are never seen in England, where always the east wind nips half the little round buds before they can expand into blossom), stand in white and green; rosemary trees, covered with gray bloom, hang down; and against the azure of the high heaven purple irides stand up arow. It is one of those days on which one can with bodily eyes see the Great Mother at her quickening work; can see her flushing the apple-boughs, unfolding the fig-leaves, and driving the lusty green blood through the sappy vines. And in the slow creeping of the fiacre up the twisting white road, each turn lays the divine Tuscan city before them in some new aspect of arresting loveliness.
At Florence, one is like Balaam with the Israelites. One is taken to see her from one point after another, each point seeming fairer than the last; but the likeness ends there, for no wish to curse the sweet town could ever arise in even the morosest heart. The hills have put on their summer look of dreamy warmth and distance. Before they have reached the hilltop the boon Italian air has kissed most of the creases out of Jim's temper, and the brick-red from Amelia's cheek-bones. He looks remorsefully from the triumphant beauty around, into the poor, fond face opposite to him—looks at her with a sort of compassion for being so unlovely, mixed with a compunctious admiration and tenderness for her gentle qualities. He may touch her hand without fear of observation, so wholly is Byng enveloped in the mantle of Cecilia's voluble tenderness.
"Have you forgiven me?" he asks, smiling; "I will make any apologies, eat any dirt, say anything, short of allowing that Sybilla is not bilious."
They have reached the villa, and turned out of the dusty highway into a great cool courtyard, that has a Moorish look, with its high arches, over which the Banksia roses tumble in cascades of yellow and white. It seems wrong that the voices which come from the tea-tables under the Loggia should be chattering English or Yankee, instead of cooing that "sweet bastard Latin" that better suits place and day.
The hostess shakes hands absently with Burgoyne, offers his fair charges iced coffee, and then, having discharged her conscience towards them, draws Byng away for an intimate chat. From her hands he passes into those of several other willing matrons and maids, and it seems likely that the party who brought him will see him no more. Amelia, unused to, and unexpectant of attention, is perfectly content to sit silent, sipping her cold coffee; but Cecilia is champing her bit in a way which frightens her future brother-in-law so much that he cowardly takes the opportunity of her looking in another direction to lure his docilefiancéeon to the broad terrace, whence all the young green glory of the Arno's plain, and the empurpled slopes and dreamful breast of Morello, are to be seen by the looker's beauty-drunk eye. Upon this terrace many people are walking and sitting in twos and threes, and in one of the little groups Amelia presently discovers a female acquaintance, who at once fastens upon her, and happening to be afflicted with a relative visited by a disorder of something the same nature as Sybilla's, subjects her to a searching and exhaustive catechism as to the nature of her sister's symptoms. Sybilla's symptoms, whether at first or second hand, have invariably the property of driving Jim into desert places; and, in the present instance, seeing no likelihood of an end to the relation of them, he turns impatiently away, and, without much thought of where he is going, follows a steep downward path that ends in a descent of old stone steps, between whose crevices green plants and little hawkweed blow-balls flourish undisturbed, to a large square well, framed by a low broad parapet, with flower-beds set around it, and the whole closed in by rugged stone walls. No one apparently has had the same impulse as he, for, at first, he has the cool solitude to himself. He sits down on the parapet of the still well, and drops in pebbles to see how deep the water is; and anon lifts his idle look to the empty niches in the crumbling wall—niches where once wood-god, or water-nymph, or rural Pan stood in stone, now empty and forsaken. Out of the wall two ilexes grow, and lift themselves against the sapphire arch, which yet is no sapphire, nor of any name that belongs to cold stone; a blue by which all other blues are but feeble colourless ghosts of that divinest tint.
He is roused from the vague reverie into which the cool silence and the brooding beauty around have lulled him, by the sound of approaching voices. He is not to have his well any longer to himself. He looks up with that scarcely latent hostility in his eye with which one regards the sudden intruder into a railway carriage, when—counting on keeping it to one's self for a long night journey—one has diffused limbs and parcels over its whole area. The owners of the voices, having descended, as he had done, the age-worn steps, come into sight. They are both men, and one of them he recognises at once as a Mr. Greenock, a well-known stock figure in Florentine society, a mature bachelor diner-out, a not ill-natured retailer of news, collector ofbons-mots, and harmless appendage of pretty women. Of the other, at whom he scarcely glances, all he grasps is the fact that he is dressed in clerical attire, and that the first words audible of his speech, as he comes within hearing, is the name of an English county—Devonshire. The answer comes in a tone of keen interest:
"Ah, I thought there must be a screw loose!"
As the new arrivals become aware of the presence of a third person, they pause in their talk; but presently, Mr. Greenock having recognised Jim and greeted him with a friendly nod and a trivial remark upon the splendour of the day, they resume their interrupted theme, standing together a few yards distant from him on the walk—resume it in a rather lower but still perfectly audible key.
"I thought there must be some reason for their shutting themselves up so resolutely," continues Mr. Greenock in the gratified tone of one who has at length solved a long-puzzling riddle. "I thought that there must be a screw loose, in fact; but are you quite sure of it?"
The other gives a sigh and a shrug.
"Unfortunately there can be no doubt on that head; the whole lamentable occurrence took place under my own eyes; the Moat is in my parish."
"Devonshire!" "A screw loose!" "The Moat!" Burgoyne is still sitting on the well-brim; but he no longer sees the lapis vault above, nor the placid dark water below. A sort of horrible mist is swimming before his eyes; it is of Elizabeth Le Marchant that they are speaking. Through that mist he snatches a scared look at the speaker; at him whom but two minutes ago he had glanced at with such a cursory carelessness. Does he recognise him? Alas! yes. Though changed by the acquisition of a bald head and a grizzled beard, he sees him at once to be the man who, at the time of his own acquaintance with the Le Marchant family, had filled the office of vicar of their parish; under whom he had sat on several drowsy summer Sunday mornings, trembling at the boys' perilous antics in the great curtained pew, and laughing inwardly at Elizabeth's mirth-struggling efforts to control them.
"And you say that they never held up their heads again afterwards?" pursues Mr. Greenock in a tone of good-natured compassion, that is yet largely tinged with gratified curiosity.
"They left the neighbourhood at once," returns the clergyman. "Dear me, how time flies! it must be ten years ago now, and I never saw them again until I met the unhappy girl and her mother yesterday, driving in the Via Tornabuoni; but"—lowering his voice a little more—"you will understand that this is strictlyentre nous; that it must not go any further."
"What do you think I am made of?" cries Mr. Greenock in a burst of generous indignation; "but"—stepping a pace or two nearer to his interlocutor—"I am not quite sure that I have got the details of the story right; would you mind just running it over to me again?"
Jim has been sitting in such a stunned stillness that it is perhaps no wonder that they have forgotten his neighbourhood. At all events, the clergyman is evidently about to comply with his companion's request and recapitulate the tale. If Jim preserves his motionless attitude but five minutes longer, he will be put into possession of that story whose existence he has already heavily conjectured, and the imagining of which has made him often, within the last week or two, turn with nausea from his food, and toss restlessly upon his bed. Without any trouble on his part, without any possible blame attaching to him, he will learn the poor soul's secret. Never! If the devil wish to tempt him with a prospect of success, it must be with a less unhandsome bait. Almost before the two startled scandalmongers have recalled the fact of his existence by the abrupt noise of his departure, he is half-way back to the terrace, that mist still before his eyes, and a singing in his ears.