"A merry going out bringeth often a mournful return home; and a joyful evening makes many times a sad morning."
"A merry going out bringeth often a mournful return home; and a joyful evening makes many times a sad morning."
The return drive, as it is quicker, being all downhill, so is it a more silent one than that to the villa had been. Byng, indeed, is as gaily willing to be fondled by Cecilia as he was on his way up; but there is a mixture of maidenly reserve and sub-tender reproach in her manner which makes their relations somewhat strained. The afternoon's pleasuring has had a jading effect upon Amelia's spirits, as, after having been sucked dry on the subject of Sybilla's maladies, and afterwards at once shaken off, by her female acquaintance, she has not been fortunate enough to meet with anyone else to exchange talk with, and has sat in disconsolate yet patient loneliness on a stone bench, afraid to stir from the spot where he had left her, lest she might miss her lover, of whom, however, she has unaccountably seen nothing, until when the Angelus is ringing, and the shadows spreading, he has come to give her curt notice, with half-averted face, that the fiacre is at the door. In point of fact, he has been too conscious of the disorder of his features to dare to expose them sooner than he can help to her fond scrutiny. He would give anything to be able to sit beside, instead of opposite to her during their drive home, as a profile is a much less tell-tale and more governable thing than a full face; and he is painfully conscious that as often as she imagines she can do it without being detected by him, she is stealing looks of inquiring anxiety at him. He tries to put her off the scent by spasmodic comments upon the entertainment that they have just quitted; and she does her best to keep up the ball of conversation, since she sees that it is his wish. But in vain. Each forced remark falls still-born, leading to nothing. It is Cecilia who at last succeeds in giving a fillip to the languid talk.
"I did not know that Mrs. Roche was a cousin of your beauty, Miss Le Marchant," she says suddenly, growing tired of her pensive attitude, and addressing herself to Jim.
He starts guiltily. "Did not you?"
He must look odd; for even Cecilia's large and preoccupied cow eyes rest upon him with an expression of surprise.
"I wonder why she was not there to-day."
It is not exactly a question, yet her great shallow orbs do not seem to be going to leave his face until he makes some response. He forces himself to do so.
"I understood Miss Le Marchant to say that they are not going out just now."
"And why are not they, pray?" inquires Cecilia, in an injured voice, as if the retirement from the world of the two ladies in question were a personal injury to herself; "they are not in mourning, all their gowns are coloured ones, and they do not look as if they had bad health—perhaps, however" (after a moment's thoughtful attempt to find a solution)—"perhaps, however, they may have something—one never knows—people have such unexpected diseases nowadays—hysteria, perhaps, or fits."
At this ingenious suggestion Jim is conscious of a writhing motion passing over the stalwart form of Byng beside him. In his own brain, if there is room for anything but the desire to evade Amelia's eyes, is a dim sense of relief at a suggestion so grotesquely wide of the mark as that made by the younger Miss Wilson. In perfect innocence of the effect produced upon her companions by her bright hypothesis, Cecilia goes on to remind her sister of the parallel case of a very handsome girl whom they had once reckoned among their acquaintance, and who was periodically being found by her family with her head under the fender. But Amelia rises but faintly to the reminiscence, and the remainder of the drive is accomplished in a general silence.
The next day is the one which had been fixed upon for the expedition to Certosa. It was only with a very large admixture of wormwood in his prospective pleasure that Jim had ever looked forward to this party, but now he anticipates it with absolute dread. How can he face Elizabeth and her mother, with that ominous phrase of the "screw loose" still ringing in his ears? He feels a traitor towards them, in that he has, however unwillingly, overheard it. To add to his mental uneasiness is the fact of his having as yet not broken to Amelia his intentions with regard to the disposal of his afternoon. Amelia's eyes have for years had the habit of covertly watching him to read his wishes almost before they rose; but in their gaze yesterday he had, unless misled by his guilty conscience, detected a new quality, a quality of alarm and enlightenment. He will get over the communication of his piece of news as early in the day as may be; so, having finished breakfast before Byng has put in his, as usual, tardy appearance, he takes his hasty way to the Anglo-Américain. He finds the family there in a more placid frame of mind than that which they had presented on one or two of his recent visits. Sybilla is expecting her doctor, on which occasions she always likes to have a more lacy coverlet than usual thrown over her languid feet; a greater efflorescence of pink ribbons about her thin throat, and a disposition of pots of lilies about her wan head. Amelia, active and long-suffering as usual, is moving about in patient execution of her vain and tiresome whimsies. Cecilia sits tranquilly in the window, knitting an elaborate pair of men's woollen gloves, not indeed—to do her justice—for anyone in particular, but with a wise forethought for the accidents and possibilities of life. Since, on this occasion, his sweetheart shows no inclination to draw him away into the dining-room for atête-à-tête, Jim has to take the bull by the horns, and rush into his subject in a more public manner than he had intended. But the one desire to get it over outbalances all minor considerations.
"Amelia," he begins suddenly, and even to himself his voice sounds discourteous and abrupt, "shall you want me this afternoon?"
The moment that the words are out of his mouth it strikes him that the form into which he has thrown his question is more than necessarily untender. She stops in the patting of Sybilla's smart pillows, and perhaps there is something a little abrupt too in her monosyllabic "Why?"
"Because," standing before the fireplace, with his back to the three women, and throwing the words over his shoulder, "because, if you do not, Byng and I were thinking of going to Certosa."
There is a pause. He hears that Cecilia's needles have stopped clicking; her work has dropped into her lap. In another moment she will have proposed to come too. "With the Le Marchants," he goes on, shooting out the fateful words like bullets; "apartie carrée."
Still silence behind him. He cannot go on staring for ever at the billets of wood of the unlit fire. He has to turn round and face his companions. The only one of them whose pleasure or displeasure in his announcement he at all heeds—Amelia—is stooping over Sybilla, rearranging in a high, picturesque tier behind the invalid's long back, three cushions, and her face is almost entirely hidden from him by her attitude.
"Of course if it is in the least inconvenient, if you have made any other plans for me—if, in fact, you want me," he continues in a tone that is at once apologetic and dogged.
"But I do not," cries she, answering at last, and with a distinct laugh in her voice, a laugh into whose quality he is not anxious too curiously to inquire. "You must not be so conceited as to think that I always want you! In point of fact, you could not have hit upon a day that suited me better. I am really rather 'throng' to-day, as they say in Yorkshire. I have quite a hundred things to do, and father wants me to help him to correct the proofs of his sermon, the sermon he preached at Mr. Moffat's church on the Holy Innocents' Day. He has been asked to publish it—is not that flattering? Poor father, I believe he will end by being a popular preacher—in fact" (laughing again), "the whole family is going up in the world!"
There is such a forced mirth in her tone that Jim feels much more guiltily uncomfortable than if she had treated him to hysterics or sulks. Nor does his satisfaction with himself increase, when, upon his rising to depart, she runs out of the room after him, to say to him, while her homely face twitches against her will, how much she hopes that he will enjoy himself; how perfectly happy she shall be without him; and how eagerly she shall look forward to hearing all about it from him to-morrow. "It will be almost better than going to Certosa herself," she ends.
But against the unnatural altitude of this last flight of abnegation nature revolts, and, becoming conscious of a break in her voice, she hastily retreats and gets back into thesalon, in time to see Cecilia shaking her elaborate head, and to hear her remarking with slow emphasis, "Mark my words! There is something odd about those people, and it is not hysteria!"
With spirits sensibly worsened by his interview, Burgoyne returns to the Minerva, and, mounting to Byng's bedroom, finds that young gentleman stretched upon his bed, gloom in his usually jocund eye, and an open letter lying on the floor beside him. But Jim is far too preoccupied to notice anybody's gloom but his own.
"I came to ask at what hour we are to set off this afternoon?" he says with a sort of flat moroseness in his tone.
"We, indeed!" rejoins the other with a groan, and rolling over with a sort of petulance on the bed, dishevelling the neatly-smoothed pillow by burrowing his ruffled head in it—"we!"
There is such a heart-rent woe in the accent with which the last monosyllable is pronounced that for a moment Burgoyne has no other idea but that his young friend, too, has become aware of the "screw loose," has heard, perhaps in detail, that story from before whose ominous opening he himself had fled. The thought sends his heart into his throat, so as to render him incapable of asking an explanation of the other's affliction.
"We!" repeats Byng for the third time, and very indistinctly, as he is now lying entirely on his face.
"Why do you go on saying 'we' in that idiotic way?" asks Jim at last, recovering his voice—recovering it only to employ it in imitating the younger man's accents, in a manner which displays more exasperation than natural talent for mimicry. It is not a politely-worded inquiry, but it has the desired result of acting as a tonic on him at whom it is aimed, making him not only roll over once again, but actually sit up.
"Why do I saywe?" repeats he, his young eyes looking lamentably out from under the fall of his tumbled hair—"because it is notwe! it isyou! You lucky dog, you will have her all to yourself!"
Jim heaves an inaudible sigh of relief. Whatever may be the cause of his companion's enigmatical conduct, it is evidently not what he had feared. There is, however, no evidence of relief or any other mild quality in his next remark.
"If you would talk less like an ass, I should have a better chance of knowing what you are driving at!"
The query seems only to renew and deepen the other's tribulation. He falls back into his former attitude.
"You will hold the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand!" he groans. "No, do not go" (with a sudden and startling change of tone, springing off the bed, as he becomes aware that his friend is making for the door, unable to bear those rhapsodies, whose full distastefulness to their hearer the utterer little conjectures). "I'll tell you! I'll explain. Why are you in such a deuce of a hurry? I cannot go to Certosa because I have just heard from my mother that she is to arrive to-day. She will be here in another hour."
Jim's fingers are already on the door handle, but this piece of news arrests him.
"Your mother? I did not know that she was coming abroad."
"No more did I!"
"It must have been a very sudden thought!"
"Very!"
"What a delightful surprise for you!"
"Delightful!" There is so ludicrous a discrepancy between the adjective and the accent with which it is rendered that Jim bursts into a bitter laugh.
"She would be flattered if she could see your elation at the prospect of meeting her!"
Byng's blood rushes up under his clear smooth skin at his friend's jeer, but he answers, with some dignity:
"I do not think you have any right to imply that I am not always glad to see my mother; I do not deny that, if it had been equally convenient to her, I had rather she should have come twenty-four hours later."
Jim feels ashamed of himself, though, being an Anglo-Saxon, he has far too much false shame to confess it directly, and what he means for anamende, when it comes, is of an oblique nature.
"I think far the best plan will be to put off the excursion altogether; I am sure that I am not particularly keen about it."
The indignant red has rapidly died out of Byng's face; his placability being only to be surpassed by his slowness to take offence.
"Is it possible?" he asks in a tone of stupefaction; then, with a sudden tardy recollection of the rosy fetters in which his friend is held by another lady, he adds—"But, of course, you are not—I was forgetting!"
Jim winces.
"As it is your party, you had better send up a note at once to the Piazza d'Azeglio."
"No, do not let us both throw them over!" cries Byng eagerly. "Heaven knows it was hard enough to persuade them to accept in the first instance. If you go we shall at all events keep our communications open; and you—you will say something to her for me?"
"What kind of something?" inquires the older man carpingly. "Am I to tell her only what a fine fellow you are in general, or anything more circumstantial?"
"Tell her——" begins Byng in a rapt voice; but apparently the sight of his companion, who has somewhat ostentatiously pulled out a note-book and pencil, and assumed the patient air of one about to write to dictation, dries the stream of his young eloquence; "tell her—nothing."
"'Nothing speaks our grief like to speak nothing!'"
"'Nothing speaks our grief like to speak nothing!'"
replies Jim, leaving the room with this quotation on his lips, rather hastily, for fear lest the other should change his mind.
It is five o'clock, the hour fixed for the expedition to Certosa, and in theentresolof 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio, Mrs. and Miss Le Marchant are sitting—hatted, gloved, anden-tout-cas-ed—in expectation of the arrival of their double escort. Elizabeth's afternoon has, so far, not been a lazy one, as her little cousin Bertie and his dog have again been good enough to pay her a lengthy visit, and the former has insisted upon a repetition of the musical performance of the other day, though with truncated rites. Without the powerful aid of Byng, Elizabeth has found it a task considerably beyond her strength to hold a large collie, poised on his hind-legs, on a music-stool. He has jumped down repeatedly, and now lies on his back—an attitude in which experience has taught him he is less attackable than in any other—sawing the air with his fore-paws, and lifting his lip in a deprecating grin.
"Where is Mr. Byng?" cries Bertie fretfully, baulked in his efforts to make his wily victim resume the perpendicular. "I want Mr. Byng! Why does not Mr. Byng come?"
"Perhaps if you went to the window," suggests Mrs. Le Marchant, in that patiently coaxing voice in which we are wont to address a tiresome child on a visit, instead of the buffet which we should bestow upon it were it resident—"perhaps if you went to the window and looked out, you would see him coming round the corner of the Piazza."
The suggestion is at once accepted, and the child, balancing his fidgety body on a chair, and craning his neck over the window-ledge, is shouting shrill pieces of information as to the passers-by to his friends within the room. Presently he shrieks out in triumph:
"I see him! He is just coming into sight! He is walking so fast! No!"—a moment later, with a changed and disgusted note, as a nearer view corrects the first impression—"it is not he at all! It is only the other one!"
"Only the other one!" It is quite impossible that the sound of the child's voice can reach down to the open portal of No. 12 bis, at which Jim has now arrived, and it is also certain that neither of the ladies whom he has come to visit is likely to word her surprise at his having arrived alone with the frank brutality which is confined to the utterances of infancy; and yet Jim, as he presents himself, announced by Annunziata, the hard-featured possessor of a lovely name, is quite as conscious, as if he had overheard the boy's slighting remark, of being "only the other one!"
Before he can begin his apologies, the eager little boy has run up to him.
"Where is Mr. Byng? I want Mr. Byng! Why has not he come? Elizabeth wants Mr. Byng!"
At this last clause Burgoyne is conscious of a dark, hot flush rising to his face, and, partly to hide it, partly to avoid seeing what the effect of his communication may be upon her for whom it is meant, he stoops over the child, addressing his answer to him:
"Mr. Byng is very sorry, very sorry indeed, but he cannot come."
"Cannot come! Why cannot he come?"
"Because he has gone to meet his mammy," replies Jim, trying to speak in a light and playful voice; "she is to arrive unexpectedly in Florence to-day; no good boy would leave his mammy when she had come all the way from England to see him, would he?"
But to this fustian and copy-book generality the young gentleman addressed is too angry to reply.
"It is a great disappointment to Byng; he bid me tell you what a great disappointment it is to him!" says Jim, turning to the two ladies, and looking apologetically from one to the other.
Elizabeth's head is averted; but on her mother's features he sees, or fancies he sees, slight evidences of a feeling not unlike relief.
"It is not of the least consequence," she says cheerfully; "we can go any other day just as well."
Burgoyne's heart sinks. In these last sentences he too surely traces signs of the evasive and would-be-retrograde nature which has all along characterized Mrs. Le Marchant's relations with him. It has seemed to him that he has been looking forward to the expedition with sensations of almost unmixed dread, and yet, now that he seems to be going to be delivered from it, what he experiences certainly does not come under the head of elation.
"You wish to give up the excursion?" he asks, in a tone which he honestly tries to make as neutral and colourless as he can.
"Well, I thought so—we thought so, did not we, Elizabeth?"
The person thus addressed lifts her head, and all over her features he, eagerly scanning them, sees written a warm acquiescence in her motherly decision, an acquiescence which, as her eyes meet his—his, in which his disappointment is written a good deal more plainly than he is aware—changes slowly and sweetly into indecision.
"I do not know," she answers, her gentle look clouded a little, and yet kindly interrogating his; "if Mr. Burgoyne is willing to burden himself with us; and Bertie must play at being a grown-up gentleman, and help to take care of us! Bertie, will you play at being a grown-up gentleman?"
To this proposition Bertie assents warmly, and begins thrasonically to recount to inattentive ears the high and singular deeds with which he will celebrate his arrival at maturity. But, as Mrs. Le Marchant puts a strenuous veto upon his adoption as escort, and as his nurse appears at the same juncture to fetch him, he and his dog are presently removed; and the other three set off without him.
Burgoyne has chartered a fiacre, with a horse as little lame as is ever to be found in Florence, and in this vehicle they are presently rolling along. None of them are in very exuberant spirits. Burgoyne is as well aware as if her sensitive lips had put the fact into words, that for Elizabeth the pleasure of the outing has evaporated with the absence of Byng, and that it is only the soft-hearted shrinking of a sweet nature from inflicting mortification on a fellow-creature that has set her opposite to him in her white gown. He has never seen her dressed in white before, and says to himself that it was for Byng's sake that she has made herself so summer-fine. But even if it be so, it is not Byng who is profiting by it. It is for him, not Byng, that the large Italian light is glorifying its thin fabric. Lily-pure, snow-clean she looks, sitting under her sunshade; and he sits over against her in a stupid silence. It seems to him as if his only safety were in silence, as if, did he speak at all, he must put into brutal words the brutal questions that are dinging in his head, that seem knocking for utterance against the gate of his set teeth.
"What is the 'screw loose'? How is she an 'unfortunate girl'? Why have they 'never held up their heads since'? Since what?" He looks, in a fierce perplexity, from one to the other of those delicately poised heads, held aloft with such modest dignity. Surely it is beyond the bounds of possibility that any heavily hideous shame or leaden disgrace can ever have weighed upon them! Probably the intensity of his thought has given an intensity to his look, of which he is unaware; for he presently finds the soft veiled voice of Elizabeth—Elizabeth who has hitherto been as mute as himself—addressing him:
"How very grave you look! I wonder what you are thinking of?"
The question, striking in so strangely pat, brings him back with a start. For a second an almost overpowering temptation assails him to tell her what is the object of his thought, to answer her with that whole and naked truth which we can so seldom employ in our intercourse with our fellow-men. But one glance at her innocent face, which has a vague trouble in it, chases the lunatic impulse, though he dallies with the temptation to the extent of saying:
"Would you really like to know? Do you really wish me to tell you?"
He looks at her penetratingly as he puts the question. Before either his eyes or his manner she shrinks.
"Oh, no—no!" she cries with tremulous haste, "of course not! I was only joking. What business have I with your thoughts? I never wish to know people's thoughts; if their looks and words are kind, that is all that concerns me!"
He relapses into silence; but her words, and still more the agitated manner in which they are pronounced, make a vague yet definite addition to the disquiet of his soul.
By setting off at so judiciously late an hour as five o'clock, they have avoided the greater part of the flood of tourists which daily sets towards Certosa, and which they meet, tightly packed in crowded vehicles, sweeping Florence-wards in a choking cloud of white dust; so that on reaching the Certosa Monastery, sitting so grandly on its hilltop, they have the satisfaction of finding that it is temporarily all their own—all their own but for the few white-frocked figures and tonsured heads which an economico-democratic Government has left to hint what in its palmy days was the state of that which is now only a Government museum.
A burly monk receives them. He does not look at all a prey to the pensive sorrow one would expect at the desecration of his holy things and the dispersion of his fraternity. Probably, in his slow peasant mind there is room for nothing but self-congratulation at his being one of the few—only fifteen in all—left to end their days in the old home. He leads them stolidly through chapels and refectory—the now too roomy refectory, where the poor remnant of Carthusians dine together only on Sundays—through meagrely furnished cells, in one of which he matter-of-factly lets down the front flap of a cupboard to show what forms his daily dining-table except on the happy Sunday, to which he must look forward so warmly.
"Must not he love Sunday!" cries Elizabeth, with sparkling eyes. "Do not you long to know what they have for dinner on Sundays? Do you think he would mind telling us?"
Elizabeth's spirits are going up like quicksilver. It is evident, despite the delicate melancholy of her face, that she is naturally of an extremely joyous and enjoying nature, and gifted with a freshness of sensation which belongs ordinarily rather to the green age at which Jim first remembers her, than to the mature one which he knows for a certainty that she has now reached. She is filled with such a lively and surprised delight at all the little details of arrangement of the monastic life that he is at last impelled to say to her, something wonderingly:
"But you must have seen hundreds of monasteries before?"
"Not one."
"But there are, or were, such swarms of them all over Italy."
"I dare say. I was never in Italy before."
"Not really?"
She lifts up her hand, and waves it at him with an air of hasty deprecation of further question, growing suddenly grave.
"Don't ask me whether I have been here or there, or whether I have done this or that. I have never been anywhere or done anything."
Her desire for a cessation of all inquiries as to her doings is obviously so earnest that Jim of course complies with it. Once or twice before he has been struck by her strange want of acquaintance with facts and phenomena, which would have come as a matter of course within the range of observation of every woman of her age and station. Against his will, a horrid recollection flashes upon him of a novel he had once read, in which the hero exhibits a singular ignorance of any events or incidents that had occurred within the ten years preceding the opening of the story—an ignorance which towards the end of the third volume was accounted for by its transpiring that he has spent the intervening period in a convict prison! He drives the grotesque and monstrous idea with scourges out of his mind; but it recurs, and recurs to be displaced by another hardly less painful, if in some degree more probable. Can it be possible that the crushing blow which has fallen upon the Le Marchant family, and upon Elizabeth in particular, whitening the mother's hair, and giving that tear-washed look to the daughter's sweet eyes—can it be possible that that heavy stroke was insanity? Can Elizabeth have been out of her mind? Can she have spent in confinement any of that past, from all allusion to which she shies away with a sensitiveness more shrinking than that of
"The tender horns of cockled snails"?
"The tender horns of cockled snails"?
He is so much absorbed in his tormenting speculations about her that for the moment he forgets her bodily presence; and it is only her voice, her soft sane voice, that brings him back to a consciousness of it. They have been led into asalon, in which, as their guide tells them, the confraternity used to receive any "personage" that came to visit them. Alas, no personage ever visits the poor frocked remnant now! It is a charming lightsome room, that gives one no monastic idea, with pretty airy fancies of flower-wreaths and arabesques, and dainty dancing figures painted on wall and ceiling and doors. One of these latter is half open, and through it comes an exquisite sudden view of the hills, with their sharp-cut shadows and their sunlit slopes; of shining Florence at their feet, of the laugh of young verdure, and the wedded gloom and glory of cypress and poplar filling the foreground. Upon Elizabeth's small face, turned suddenly towards him, seems reflected some of the ineffable radiance of the Tuscan light.
"When next I dream of heaven," she says, in her tender, vibrating voice, "it will be like this. Do you ever dream of heaven? I often do, and I always wake crying because it is not true; but"—with a joyful change of key—"I will not cry any more without better cause. Since I came here I have found earth beautiful and delightful enough for me!"
He looks back at her, hardly hearing her words, but chiding himself fiercely for the disloyal thought which he has entertained, however unwillingly; the thought that the foul fiend of madness could ever, even temporarily, have defiled the temple of those eyes whence reason and feeling, so sweetly wedded, are shining out upon him, unworthy as he is of their rays.
"Since you came here?" he repeats in a sort of dreamy interrogation; "only since you came here?"
"You must not take me up so sharply!" she cries in a voice of playful remonstrance, in which there is a lilt of young gaiety. "I warn you that I will not be taken up so sharply! I did not say, 'onlysince I came here!' I said, 'Since I came here!'"
Presently they pass into the still, cloistered garden, in whose unmown grass-squares gray-blue flowers are blowing, beside whose walks pale pink peonies are flushing, and round whose well the grave rosemary bushes are set. Through the whole place is an atmosphere of deep peace, of silence, leisure, dignity. It is virtually atête-à-tête, as their tonsured guide, seeing their evident harmlessness, has left them to their own devices; and Mrs. Le Marchant has sat down to rest upon a camp-stool which Elizabeth has been carrying ever since they left the carriage. It has fidgeted Jim to see her burdened with it; for let a man be ever so little in love with a woman, his tendency always is to think her as brittle as spun glass, to believe that any weight, however light, will bruise her arm—any pebble, however tiny, wound her tender foot. He has offered to relieve her of it, but she has refused—playfully at first—telling him she is sure that he will lose it; and afterwards, when he insists, more gravely, though with gentle gratitude, saying that it would never do for her to get into the habit of being waited upon, and that she always carries mammy's things. It is perhaps absurd that a woman of six-and-twenty should speak of her mother as "mammy," yet the homely and childish abbreviation seems to him to come "most fair and featously" from her lips.
They stay a long time in the sun-kissed garden, considering that there is after all not very much to see there. But Elizabeth's light steps, that to-day seem set to some innocent dancing-tune, are loath to leave it; she must smell the great new peonies, monthly-rose-coloured, faintly perfumed; she must steal a sprig of rosemary "to put into her coffin when she dies," at which he catches his breath, shuddering; she must peep into the well. He insists on her holding his hand for safety as she leans over to do so; her little fingers grip his tight as she cranes her neck and bends her lissom body. But what a small handful they are, compared to those other fingers—those kind, useful, but undoubtedly solid fingers—which he has held perfunctorily through many a matter-of-fact hour. By-and-by they stray away together out of the bounteous air of the hilltop into a semi-underground church, to see the fifteenth and sixteenth century monuments, which look as fresh as if their marble had left its home in Carrara but yesterday. They stand looking down at those three kin who lie side by side before the high altar, each with head dropped a little sideways on the shoulder, as if overcome by sudden sleep. They step on into the side chapel, where that yet nobler mitred figure, fashioned by Donatello's hand, stretches his prone length above his border of fruit and flowers, among which lies a carved skull, through whose empty eye-holes—strange and grisly fancy contrasting with so much beauty—a mocking ribbon runs. Elizabeth is perfectly silent the whole time, but no flood of talk could make Jim half so conscious of her presence, palpitating with sympathy and feeling, could give half the confidence he enjoys that she will introduce no allusion to either Kensal Green or Woking, as it is but too probable that the excellent companion of most of his Florentine rambles would have done.
Elizabeth has been perfectly silent, yet at last she speaks. It is in the Chapter House, where, as most of us have done, they have suddenly come upon another tomb, the tomb of one lying full-length on the pavement before the altar, with no separating edge of marble or wrought-iron railing to keep him from the foot of the passer-by. He lies there, portrayed with such an extraordinary vividness of life about his prostrate figure and his severe, powerful face, that one feels inclined to speak low, lest he should lift his white lids and look rebuke at us. In the lines about his mouth there is a hint of sardonic mirth. Is he—hearing our foolish chatter—touched with a grave contemptuous amusement at it? Or is he keeping in his sleep the memory of some four hundred years old jest? Elizabeth has involuntarily crept close to Burgoyne's side, with the gesture of a frightened child.
"Are you sure that he did not stir?" she asks tremulously under her breath. Her next thought is that her mother must see him too, this wonderful living dead man, and they presently set forth to return to the garden to fetch her. But apparently she has grown tired of waiting for them, for, as they enter the cloisteredenceinte, they see her advancing to meet them.
"I would not be left alone with him at night for the wealth of the Indies," Elizabeth is saying, with a half-nervous laugh. "Oh, mammy, you would never have forgiven me if I had let you go without seeing him! Why, what is this?"—with a sudden change of key—"what has happened?" For as they draw near to Mrs. Le Marchant they see that her walk is a staggering one, and that the usually healthy, clear pallor of her face is exchanged for a livid whiteness. "What is it, darling?" cries Elizabeth in an accent of terror. "Oh, Jim, she is going to faint!" In the agitation of the moment she has unconsciously returned to the familiar address which she used always to employ towards him in their boy-and-girl days. "Put your arm round her on that side, I can hold her up on this. Let us get her back to the camp-stool."
A camp-stool is neither an easy nor a luxurious seat upon which to deposit a half-swooning woman, but the joint exertions of her daughter and of Burgoyne presently succeed in replacing her on her rickety resting-place; their arms interlace each other behind her back, and their anxious eyes look interrogation at one another above her head, half dropped on Elizabeth's slight shoulder.
"Does she often faint? Is she apt to do it?" asks Jim, in a whisper.
"Never—never!" replies the girl in a heart-rent voice, raining kisses on her mother's white face. "Oh, darling, darling, what has happened to you?"
Perhaps it is through the vivifying rain of those warm kisses, but a little colour is certainly beginning to steal back into the elder woman's cheek, and she draws a long breath.
"Oh, if she could have a glass of water!" cries Elizabeth, greedily verifying these slight signs of returning consciousness. "Get her a glass of water! Oh, please get her a glass of water—quick! quick!"
Burgoyne complies, though it is not without reluctant misgivings that he withdraws the efficacious support of his own solid arm, and leaves Elizabeth's poor little limb to bear the whole weight of her mother's inert body.
Their guide has, as before mentioned, disappeared; and Jim has not the slightest idea in which direction to seek him. It is five good minutes before he discovers him, standing near the door of the monastery, in conversation with a visitor who is apparently just in the act of departure. The stranger is in clerical dress; and, as he turns to nod farewell to the monk, Jim recognises in his features those of the Devonshire clergyman, whom he had last seen, and so unwillingly heard, by the well-brim of the Bellosguardo villa. In a second a light has flashed into his mind. Mrs. Le Marchant, too, has seen that stranger—has seen him for the first time for ten years, since it is evident that the recognition of mother and daughter in the Via Tornabuoni, to which the Moat's late rector had referred, could not have been reciprocal. It is to the fact of her having been brought suddenly and unpreparedly face to face with that mysterious past, which seems to be always blocking his own path to her friendship, that is to be attributed the poor woman's collapse. A rush of puzzled compassion flows over him as he realizes the fact, and his one impatient wish is to return with all the speed he may to the forlorn couple he has left, to reassure them as to the removal (even though it may only be a temporary one) out of their path of the object of their unexplained terror. Will the mother have imparted to her child the cause of her fainting, or will she have tried to keep it from her?
The first glimpse he gets when, having at length procured the desired glass of water, he comes into sight of them, answers the question for him. Mrs. Le Marchant is evidently partially recovered. She is sitting up, no longer supported by her daughter's arm, and that daughter is lying on her knees, with her head buried in her mother's lap. As he nears them, he sees the elder woman hurriedly pressing her daughter's arm to warn her of his approach, and Elizabeth obediently lifts her face. But such a face! He can scarcely believe it is the same that laid itself—hardly less bloomily fair than they—against the faint peony buds half an hour ago; a face out of which the innocent glad shining has been blown by some gust of brutal wind—scared, blanched, miserable.
"Oh, yes, I am better, much better—quite well, in fact," says Mrs. Le Marchant, pushing away the offered glass, and speaking with a ghastly shadow of her former even cheerfulness. "Give it to Elizabeth, she needs it more than I do! You see, I gave her a terrible fright!"
He silently holds out the water to Elizabeth, and she, without attempting to take the tumbler into her own trembling hand, drinks. He looks with impotent pity from the bent blonde head to the prematurely snow-white one. How can he word his reassurance to them without appearing to thrust himself with officious insolence into their confidence? It seems to himself that he solves the problem very clumsily.
"I am afraid you must have thought me but slow," he says, feeling that he is dragging in the piece of information he is anxious to give them with an awkward head-and-shoulder-ness: "but at first I couldn't find our monk, and when I did, he was engaged—he was talking to a visitor—a clergyman."
He pauses, conscious that at the last word a tremulous shiver has passed over the kneeling figure.
"Yes, a clergyman," he goes on with nervous haste, hurrying to put them out of their pain; "an elderly, gray-haired, English clergyman, who was just in the act of going away; indeed, before I left, he had gone. I saw him drive off!"
Ere he has finished his sentence, he is seized by the apprehension that there must appear to his listeners something suspicious in the laboured details into which he is entering; presupposing, as they do, that he is aware of there being for them an interest attaching to the fact of the stranger's departure. And indeed, as he speaks, he is conscious that Mrs. Le Marchant's frightened eyes, which have been taking surreptitious trips round the peaceful garden, now come home with a no less alarmed look to his face.
"Was he—was he—an acquaintance of yours?" she asks, with an attempt at a laugh—"this clergyman, I think you said he was—that you noticed him so particularly?"
"An acquaintance?" repeats Jim doubtfully; "what is an acquaintance? a man whom one knew very little, and disliked a good deal, ten years ago; and who passes one by without a gleam of recognition now—is that an acquaintance?"
Elizabeth's hat has fallen on the ground, and hitherto she has seemed unconscious of the evening sunbeams smiting her uncovered head; now she stoops and picks it up.
"And you did not make yourself known to him then?" continues Mrs. Le Marchant, still with that painful effort at lightness of tone. "You let him drive off without telling him who you were? or asking him where he was staying? or how long his visit to Florence is to last? or—or anything?"
Jim's eyes are fixed on her as she speaks with a compassionate steadiness, under which hers quail waveringly. Is it possible that she can imagine that she is deceiving him by this miserable pretence of indifference?
"I have no doubt that I shall be able to find out if you wish to know," he answers gravely; "for I think he must be as much an acquaintance of yours as of mine, since it was only at the Moat that I ever met him."
He had thought that Mrs. Le Marchant was already as colourless as a woman could be; but as he speaks, he sees her face take on a new degree of pallor. She struggles unsteadily to her feet.
"It is—it is getting late!" she says indistinctly; "we—ought—to be—going home!"
Even as she speaks she makes an uncertain step forward, but it is so uncertain that he catches her by the arm.
"You are not fit to move yet," he says with kind imperativeness; "rest five minutes longer; it is not late, really—the sun is quite high still."
Convinced, either by the young man's eloquence, or, as is more likely, by the shaking of her own limbs, Mrs. Le Marchant sits down again. Elizabeth has risen to her feet, and now stands beside her mother. She has said nothing, but he can see her trembling from head to heel. He hears her voice now addressing him, but in so subdued a key that her words are almost lost in the low blowing of the faint south wind that is fondling the blades of the unshorn grass.
"Did you say that he was gone? Are you sure of it?"
"Yes, yes, quite sure! I saw him go."
"Did you—did you happen to hear where he was staying?"
"No, but"—with the greatest eagerness—"I can easily find out; nothing can be simpler."
Elizabeth is standing quite close to him, so close that he can see her poor little heart leaping under the thin white gown, whose simple finery had piqued him earlier in the day. She has apparently, in her new terror, forgotten that there is any cause for concealing from him the occasion of it. She turns instinctively to him, as a hurt child to the nearest bystander. It seems to him the most natural thing in the world that she should. They are both recalled to themselves by her mother's voice.
"You must think that we have lost our wits," she says with a sickly smile; "but even if we have, I do not know what right we have to impose upon a—a comparative stranger like you, the task of helping us to gratify our—our idle curiosity."
"But I am not a comparative stranger!" cries Jim vehemently; by this time—he does not know how—he is holding a hand of each of the trembling women in his. "I am not a stranger at all! I am a friend! Why will not you treat me as one? Why will not you let me help you?"
He glances with pitying, affectionate eagerness from one to other of the woebegone faces on either side of him. The tears have come in sudden flood to the elder woman, and are pouring over her white cheeks, stopping the passage of her voice; but Elizabeth's fair eyes are drearily dry, and speech comes clear and hopeless from her.
"You are very good to us!" she says, giving the hand that holds hers a little pressure, which he feels to be as cold as it is grateful; "at least, I see that you want to be very good to us if we would let you; but as to helping us"—with a slight despairing shrug—"no one can do that; no one but God, and sometimes"—drawing a long, half-sobbing breath—"I think that it would pass even His power."
There are few things more difficult than when one's mind is full of the interests, cares, and sorrows of one set of friends, to have to empty it suddenly of them, and refill it as suddenly with the entirely different, and perhaps discrepant interests, cares, and sorrows of an altogether alien set.
Seldom in the course of their old and tried friendship has Jim Burgoyne felt less disposed for the company and conversation of his valued ally, Mrs. Byng, than when he knocks at the door of her sitting-room on the morning following the excursion to Certosa. He cannot talk to her about the Le Marchants, seeing that she has never even heard of their existence; and if out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, his talk upon any other topic must be scant and jejune indeed. The only cheerful side which his prospective visit turns to him is, that if he were not with Mrs. Byng, he would be with Amelia; and that the friendlily indifferent eyes of the former will, at all events, be less likely than the hungrily loving ones of the latter to detect that he has not slept a wink, and that he has not the remotest idea what he is talking about. If he were to follow his inclination, he would be bestowing his company this morning upon neither friend nor sweetheart, but would be ransacking Florence for the piece of information he had yesterday promised those two woebegone women to procure for them. Even into the very midst of his heartfelt sore compassion for them, there pierces a shamed unwilling flash of elation at the thought of what a stride to intimacy his being entrusted with this commission implies, of what an opening to indefinitely numerous future visits it affords. His determination to conduct the search is at present a good deal more clearly defined than the method in which that search is to be effected. He can consultGalignanias to the names and whereabouts of new arrivals; but they could do that much for themselves. He could examine the visitors' books of the different hotels; but Florence, though a little city, is rich in hostelries, and this course would take time. He could consult Mr. Greenock, the head and fount of all Florentine gossip, and who, since he had seen him in conversation with the object of his inquiries, would probably be able to satisfy them; but his acquaintance with the good-natured newsmonger is not sufficiently intimate for him to be able to pay him a morning visit with any air of probability of having been impelled thereto by a desire for his company; and, moreover, he shrinks with a morbid fear from any action which may lead, however obliquely, to his being himself apprised of the terrible secret which—it is no longer mere matter of conjecture—lies couched somewhere in those two poor creatures' past.
And meanwhile he knocks at Mrs. Byng's door, and is quickly bidden enter by a cheerful English voice, the welcoming alacrity of whose tones shames his own want of pleasure in the meeting. But he is too unfortunately honest to express a joy he does not experience, and only says, with a slight accent of reproach as he takes her ready hand, heartily held out:
"You should not spring these surprises upon us."
She laughs a little guiltily.
"It—it was a sudden thought; you see I—I had never seen Perugia."
He laughs too. "Poor Perugia! I think it would have blushed unseen for a good many more years if you had not begun to doubt the efficiency of my chaperonage. Confess! you have come to look after the precious baby-boy, have not you?"
His tone is, as he himself feels, not quite a pleasant one; but the mother is scarcely more prone to take offence than the son; and she answers with an amiably hasty disclaimer:
"It was not that I felt the least want of confidence in you—you must not think that; but—but I had one of my presentiments! you know that I am always a little superstitious; and three nights running an owl came and hooted quite close under my window!"
"As long as I have known your wood, it has had owls; and as long as I have known them, they have hooted."
"In the wood, yes, of course, and I like to hear them; but this one was close under my window."
Jim's only answer is to lift his hands and shoulders in protest against his friend's weak-mindedness.
"I had quite made up my mind that something had happened," continues she, not much abashed by his scorn; "and it was the greatest relief when I first caught sight of him at the station yesterday, looking just as usual, a little thinner perhaps—does not he strike you as a little thin? Has he been weighed lately? He gives me the idea of having lost a pound or two since I last saw him. Is there a weighing-machine in the hotel?"
"It will be very easy to ascertain."
"And how is Amelia?"—her cheerful eyes resting in friendly and half-inquisitive interest on his sombre face.
"Amelia is very well, thank you."
"Amelia Wilson still?"
"Yes."
"For how long?"—laughing—"another ten years, I suppose?"
"For three months, I believe; we are to be married as soon as they return to England."
"You do not say so?"—with an accent of lively and delighted incredulity—"hurrah! poor Amelia! 'Tout vient à point à qui sait attendre;' and she hassu attendrewith a vengeance, has not she?"
"She is not going toattendreany more," replies Jim dryly.
"Then I shall have to give you a present, I suppose!" cries Mrs. Byng, still with that delighted accent. "Something useful, I have no doubt. I feel sure that Amelia would like something useful; why should not we choose it to-day? Florence is an ideal place for buying presents; do you think that Amelia would spare you to me for a whole morning?"
Jim hesitates. It is not that he has any doubt as to Amelia's cheerful renunciation of any portion of his time that he may see fit to abstract from her; but the occupation suggested—that of squiring Mrs. Byng—is not that to which he had purposed devoting his forenoon. She sees his unreadiness to answer, and attributes it to a wrong cause.
"Amelia will not?" cries she in a tone of surprise and disappointment. "Well, I could not have believed it of her! Not even if you told her that it is on purpose to buy her a present?"
Jim breaks into an unavoidable smile. "How frightfully quickly your mind moves! It leaps like a kangaroo! I never said that she would not resign the precious boon of my society; on the contrary, I am sure that nothing would give her greater pleasure, but—but—what will Willy say to my monopolizing you?"
At the excessive disingenuousness of this speech his conscience gives him a severe prick, recalling to his mind the attitude of prostrate affliction—stretched face downwards on his bed—in which his young friend had received the news of his parent's prospective approach. A light cloud passes over that parent's sunny face.
"Willy has an engagement this morning," she answers more slowly, and with less radiance than has hitherto marked her utterances; "nothing could be sweeter and dearer than he was, and he is going to take me somewhere this afternoon—to Fiesole or Petraia, or somewhere else delightful; but this morning he has an engagement. He did not tell me what it was, and I did not like to tease him with questions. You"—with a rather wistful glance of interrogation at her companion—"do not happen to know what it is?"
Jim shakes his head, while a rather deeper shade than habitually lies upon it settles on his careworn forehead. It is perfectly true that he knows nothing of young Byng's engagement, but yet he has a shrewd suspicion to what quarter of the town that engagement will lead him.
"So that I rather counted upon you," continues Mrs. Byng, turning with a somewhat crestfallen air to the window.
"And you did not count in vain," replies Burgoyne, with a sort of forced gallantry. It has flashed upon him that he will have to consent under penalty of giving a detailed account of the reasons for his inability, and that therefore he had better make a virtue of necessity, and do it with a good grace. After all, the deferring for a couple of hours of his researches cannot be of any great consequence to the persons in whose behalf those researches are set on foot. To a suspicious ear there might be something dubious in the sudden and galvanized alacrity of his assent; but not a shadow of doubt crosses Mrs. Byng's mind as to her old and tried ally being as pleased to avail himself of an opportunity for enjoying her society as he has always showed himself during the twenty years and more of their acquaintance.
Protected by this happy misconception, she sets off, all smiles, though at the outset of the expedition she finds that she has to modify her project; and that Burgoyne shows himself restive as tobric-à-bracshops, and declines peremptorily to be any party to buying himself a wedding present. He puts his objection upon the semi-jocose ground that he shall be unable to avoid overhearing the price of her intended gift, and that his modesty could not stand the strain of helping her to haggle over it. Perhaps, however, deep in his heart is an unconscious feeling that to receive nuptial offerings gives an almost greater body and certainty to his on-striding fate than even the buying of dinner-services and saucepans. So they go to the Accademia delle Belli Arti instead, it having occurred to Jim that in a picture-gallery there will be less opportunity for conversation, less opening for interested inquiries on his companion's part as to Amelia and the minutiæ of his future life with her, than there would be in the green walks of the Cascine, or on the slopes of Fiesole.
To Mrs. Byng, who is of almost as enjoying a nature as her son, and whose spirits have been raised to a pitch even higher than their usual one, by the disproof of her presentiments, it is all one where she goes, so that she is taken somewhere, to see something. They stare up at the big young David, and stand before Fra Angelico's ineffably happy Paradiso, which yet brings the tears to the looker's eyes, perhaps out of sheer envy of the little blissful saints dancing and frolicking so gaily, or pacing so softly in the assured joy of the heavenly country. They look at Botticelli's "Spring," fantastic wanton, with her wildly-flowered gown, and her lapful of roses. The room in which she and her joyous mates stand, with their odd smiles, is one of the smaller of the gallery. It is rather a narrow one, and has an open window, giving upon a little court, where, in a neglected garden-close, wallflowers are growing, and sending in their familiar perfume. The sweet Francia saints in the picture hung on the wall directly opposite, and the rapt Madonna, must surely smell them. If they do not, it must be because a young couple, he and she, who are leaning out in their eagerness to enjoy it, have intercepted all the homely fragrance. Jim's eyes are still on the "Spring," and he is thinking half absently how little kinship she has with the goitred green women, whom his nineteenth-century disciples present to the confiding British public as representatives of Sandro Botticelli's manner, when his attention is diverted by hearing the voice of Mrs. Byng at his elbow addressing him in an excited tone:
"Why, there's Willy! Do not you see? There! leaning out of that window, and who—who is the lady whom he has with him?"
Jim looks quickly in the direction indicated, and at once recognises a slender gray figure which to-day has not assumed its white holiday gown. Elizabeth, whom he had been pitifully picturing lying heart-struck on a sofa in the seclusion of her own littleentresol, probably with lowered blinds and tear-smarting eyes, is leaning on the window-ledge with her back to the pictures—she whom he had always credited with so delicate a sensibility for Art, with her back to the pictures, as if the live picture which Byng's eager face presents to her pleases her better. A sense of indignation at having been tricked out of his compassion—who had ever seemed to need it less than the suave little figure about whose blonde head a Tuscan sunbeam, stolen through the easement, is amorously playing?—makes him forget to answer the question addressed to him, until it is repeated in a still more urgent key.
"Whoisshe? Whocanshe be? Have not you an idea? He has not seen us! Had not we better creep quietly away? Most likely he would rather not meet me; I could not bear to make him look foolish!"
The suggestion that there can be anything calculated to put Willy to the blush in being discovered in conversation with Miss Le Marchant has the effect of giving Burgoyne rapidly back his power of speech.
"What nonsense!" he cries almost rudely; "I wish you would not let your imagination run away with you so, and of course I know who she is; she is an—an acquaintance of mine. I—I presented Willy to her; she is Miss Le Marchant."
"Miss Le Who?" repeats the mother eagerly, catching the name imperfectly, as we usually do a name that is unfamiliar to us, proving how much of imagination and memory must go to eke out all our hearing—"an acquaintance of yours, is she? Oh, then, of course" (drawing a long breath of relief), "she is all right."
"All right!" echoes Jim, with an unconscious snappishness of tone, greater than he would have employed in defence of the reputation of any other lady of his acquaintance, probably because, ever since the day when he stood an unwilling eaves-dropper by that well on Bellosguardo, a hideous low voice has been whispering to his own sick heart that perhaps she is not "all right!" "All right! of course she is all right."
"But she is lovely!" cries Mrs. Byng, not paying much heed to the testy emphasis of her companion's asseveration, and continuing to stare at the unwitting girl; "what a dear little face! but," the alarm returning again into her voice, "is it possible that she is here alone with him? If so, of course she is American. Oh! do not say that she is American."
"Of course she is not," answers Burgoyne, half laughing at the plaintive intensity of this last appeal; "of course she is all that there is of most English, and there is her mother, as large as life, within a yard and a half of her; there, do not you see? looking at the Ghirlandajo."
Mrs. Byng removes her eyes from the daughter, and fixes them with a scarcely less degree of interest upon the then indicated parent.
"So that is the mother, is it? a very nice-looking woman, and what beautiful white hair! Mrs. Le——what did you say their name was? Ah! Willy has seen us, poor boy!"—laughing—"how guilty he looks! here he comes!"
And in point of fact the young man, having given a very indubitable start and said something hurried to his companion, is seen advancing quasi-carelessly to meet the two persons, the object of whose observation he has for some minutes so unconsciously been.
"Is not this a coincidence?" cries Mrs. Byng, with a rather nervously-playful accent; "itisa coincidence, though it may not look like one! But do not be afraid; we know our places, we are not going to offer to join you!"
"What should I be afraid of?" replies the young man, the colour—always as ready as a school miss's to put him to shame—mantling in his handsome smooth cheeks. "I am like the Spanish hidalgo, who never knew what fear was till he snuffed a candle with his fingers. So you and Jim are having a happy day among the pictures. Do not you like 'Spring'? I love her, though I am sure she was a real baggage!"
But this ingenious attempt to divert the current of his parents' ideas into another channel is scarcely so successful as it deserves.
"Will not you introduce me to her?" she asks eagerly, and not heeding, evidently not even hearing, the empty question contained in the last half of his speech; "does she know that I am your mother? Will not you introduce me to her?"
It seems a simple and natural request enough, and yet the young man perceptibly hesitates. He even tries to turn it off by a clumsy and entirely pointless jest.
"Introduce you to her? to whom? to 'Spring'? I am really afraid that my acquaintance with her scarcely justifies such a liberty!"
A look of surprise and of natural annoyance clouds the cheerful eagerness of Mrs. Byng's face.
"Is that a joke, dear?" she asks, with a rather vexed smile; "it is not a very good one, is it? Well, Jim, I must apply to you then;youcan have no objection to presenting me to your friends?"
"Of course not, of course not," replies he, with a stammering unreadiness, which contrasts somewhat ludicrously with the acquiescence conveyed by his words, "I shall be delighted, only——"
"Only what? Ah, here they come! they save us the trouble of going after them."
As she speaks, indeed, Mrs. Le Marchant and Elizabeth are seen nearing the little group; but it is soon apparent that this movement on their part is by no means owing to any wish or even willingness to make Mrs. Byng's acquaintance. It is indeed solely due to there being no egress from the room at that end of it where they have been standing, so that, if they wish to leave it, they must necessarily retrace their steps and pass the three persons who are so busily discussing them. They do this so quickly and with so resolute an air of not wishing to be delayed in their exit, bestowing a couple of such smileless and formal bows upon the two men, that it would have needed a much more determined obstruction than either of those gentlemen is prepared to offer to arrest their progress. In a moment they are through the doorway and out of sight. Mrs. Byng looks after them, with her mouth open.
"They—they—are obliged to go home, they—they are in a great hurry!" says the younger man, observing the displeased astonishment expressed by his mother's countenance, and with a lame effort at explanation.
"So they seemed when first we caught sight of them," retorts she dryly.
"They—they are not going out at all at present, they—they do not wish to make any fresh acquaintance: oh, by-the-bye, I forgot something I had to say to—I will be back in a moment!"
So saying, he shoots off in pursuit of the retreated figures, and Mrs. Byng and her escort are again lefttête-à-tête.
"Are you quite sure that she is all right?" asks the lady, looking at Jim with a penetrating glance that he does not enjoy; "because, if so, why was she so determined not to know me?"
"How can I tell?" answers he testily. "Perhaps—who knows?"—laughing unmirthfully—"perhaps she was not sure thatyouwere all right!"