There is always something in the nature of a mountain in a night that is interposed between us and either any promised pleasure or any threatened pain. In the case of pleasure, we are naturally in a hurry to scale it, in order to see how full of sunshine and flowers is the happy valley on the other side; and in the case of pain, we are all scarcely less eager to ascertain how deep is the abyss, how choking the swamp, how angry the waves that wait us beyond the dusty hill.
Burgoyne has no expectation of finding anything agreeable on the further slope of his mountain, and yet the time seems long to him, till he has climbed its crest, and slidden down its other side. Early and splendid as is the new light that takes possession of him and his shutterless bedroom, he upbraids it as a laggard; and the hours that pace by till the one appointed for the explanation of yesterday's mystery seem to him to hobble on crutches. What can Amelia have to say to him that needs such a pomp of preparation? What can have turned Amelia into a Tragedy Queen? What miracle can have made her take the imperative mood? For it was the imperative mood unquestionably which, contrary to all precedent, she had made use of when she had commanded him, most gently it is true, since, being by her nature gentle, she can do nothing ungently, to leave her. He absolutely laughs at the topsy-turviness of the idea. What can she have to say that requires so carefully selected a spot to say it in?—a spot where "it does not matter if she does break down." What, in Heaven's name, can she be going to say that inspires her with such a cold-blooded intention beforehand of breaking down?
Jim's state of mind is something that of the Baron's in "On ne badine pas avec l'amour," on hearing that his daughter's governess had been turning somersaults in a field of luzerne. "Non, en vérité, non, mon ami, je n'y comprends absolûment rien. Tout cela me paraît une conduite désordonnée, il est vrai, mais sans motif comme sans excuse." If she were any other woman, he should ascribe her behaviour to some tiresome but passing tantrum, evoked by his delay in appearing? But in the past eight years how many hundred times has he kept her waiting? and has she ever failed to meet him with the same meek good-humour that has not had even a tinge of reproachful forgiveness in it. As she herself had said, "In all these years how often have I been angry with you?" He has been angry with her times out of mind, angry with her on a thousand unjust and unkind counts; angry with her for her slowness, her bad complexion, her want of a sense of humour; for a hundred things that she cannot help, that she would have altered—oh, how gladly!—if she could! But how often has she been angry with him? In vain he searches his memory, hoping to overtake some instance of ill-humour, or even pettishness, that may make the balance between them hang a little more equal. But in vain. She has never been angry with him. And even now neither her face nor her manner—whatever else of strange and unparalleled they may have conveyed—have conveyed the idea of anger.
But if not anger, what then can be the cause that has produced a change so startling in one so little given to impulsive action or eccentricities of emotion? Can she have heard anything about him? anything to his discredit? He searches his conscience, but whether it be that that organ is not a particularly sensitive one, or that it really has no damaging facts to give up, it is silent, or almost so. He has perhaps been rather slack in his attendance upon her of late, but at her own bidding. At his visits to the Le Marchants' no one could take exception, dictated as they so obviously have been by philanthropy, and his conversations with Elizabeth—how few and scant! his heart heaves a rebellious sigh at their paucity—might be proclaimed without excision at the market cross. Our thoughts are our own, and are, moreover, so safely padlocked in our minds that he does not think it worth while to inquire whether, if his future wife could have looked in and seen the restive fancies capering, saddleless and bridleless, there, she might have been justified in assuming a crouching attitude and a sorrowfully commanding manner.
He is as far as ever from solving the problem, when—for once in his life before his time at the rendezvous—he presents himself at the familiar door. It is opened to him by Amelia herself. She has often done it before, seeming to know by instinct his ring from that of any other person, but to-day the familiar action disconcerts him. He had expected to be received with a formality and pomp of woe such as yesterday had seemed to threaten; and here is Amelia looking exactly like her ordinary self, except that she is perhaps rather more carefully dressed than usual; but that may be due to the fact of her having, for the first time, assumed the fresh calico gown, which the high summer of the Italian April morning seems to justify. Whether it be due to the calico gown or not, there is an indisputable air of gala about her, and she is smiling. A revulsion of feeling comes over the man, to whom her tragic semi-swooning airs had given a wakeful night. It was a tantrum after all, then; a storm in a teacup. And now her common sense has come to the rescue, and she has seen the folly of quarrelling with her bread and butter. These reflections naturally do not translate themselves into responsive smiles on his face, but she does not seem to notice his dour looks.
"I have a proposal to make to you," she says, still smiling. "Father is so well this morning, quite easy, and he has been wheeled into the sitting-room to see Sybilla. She has been very good about him this time, and quite believes that he has been really bad."
"How good of her!" comments Jim grimly; "it would be so easy and so amusing to play at having a swollen toe, would not it?"
"And so," continues Miss Wilson, wisely ignoring his fleer at her sister, "I am perfectly free, and I want you to take me somewhere, some little drive or expedition; you see," with a conciliatory glance at her own modest finery, "I counted upon your saying 'yes'; I dressed so as not to keep you waiting."
Every word of this sentence confirms Burgoyne in the idea implanted by her first address. This is heramende, and she is quite right to make it. But she would have been more right still if her conduct had not rendered it necessary.
Amelia is not the type of woman who through life will gain much by pouts. Perhaps, by-and-by, very kindly and delicately, he may obliquely hint this to her. But all that he says aloud is the rather stiff acquiescence conveyed in the words:
"By all means. I am quite at your service."
"And now where shall we go?" continues Amelia, shutting the door behind her and beginning to cross the hotel courtyard at his side; "that is the next thing—not to any gallery or church, I think, if you do not mind; I say such stupid things about Art, and the more I try, the stupider they are; let us go somewhere into the country—I can understand the country. I am not afraid of saying stupid things about it."
Into Burgoyne's mind comes the odious thought that he would not put it past his betrothed to say stupid things even about the Tuscan landscape, but he only awaits her decision in a respectful silence while helping her into a fiacre.
"It would be a sin to be under any roof to-day but this one," she says, looking up to the immeasurable azure bridge above her head; "would you mind—could you spare time to go to Fiesole?"
His only answer is to repeat the word Fiesole to the driver, who, with the inevitable tiny poodle-shaven dog beside him, is awaiting the order as to his destination. It is but a little way to Fiesole, as we all know, but yet, as the slow hired vehicle crawls up the steep ascent, with the driver walking alongside, or even lagging behind, there would be time and opportunity to say a good deal. But Amelia says next to nothing. Perhaps the heat makes her sleepy, for it is so hot, so hot between the garden walls, where the rose hedges are beginning to show a pale flush of plenteous pink among their multitude of green buds. Young, indeed, just born as the roses are, the highway dust has already powdered them with its ash-toned white. He does not know it at the time, but those dust-filmed rosebuds have found a home in his memory from which no after-sights, however numerous, will dislodge them. They have reached the village, and left their carriage, and begun, silently still, to ascend the steep lane up which the feet of most of Europe and America have in turn climbed to see the famous view that rewards the little effort. Past the cottages, whose inmates, tranquilly sitting in their doorways, or leaning idly against their door-posts, have probably seen all that is illustrious, notorious, history-making of the day, pass pantingly. Is there a prime minister, a princess, a poet, a prima donna, of the time, that has not toiled up the steep path to the welcome rest of the bench on the high plateau, on the hillside? Jim and Amelia are certainly not likely to figure in the annals of their time, but the peasants look at them with as much or as little interest as if they were. An immortal, unless his immortality is printed on his back in letters as large as those that announce Colman's mustard to the world, has, to the vulgar, very much the air of one of themselves.
Our friends have reached the haven of the stone seat, and, thanks to the earliness of the hour, have it all to themselves, save for a trio of sunburnt women of the people, with handkerchiefs tied over their tanned heads, who tease them to buy straw hand-screens. And when they have bought a couple, and made it kindly but distinctly evident that no amount of worrying will induce them to buy any more, even these leave them in peace and descend the hill again, in search of newer victims. They are alone under the sky's warm azure. Beneath their eyes spreads one of those nobly lovely spectacles that Italy and spring, hand in hand, alone can offer. To some, indeed, it may seem that the prospect from the Bellosguardo side of the valley is even more beautiful, since Fiesole, sitting so high as she does, dwarfs the opposite hills, and makes the looker lose their wavy line. They seem flat in comparison, the plain appears wider, the beloved city more distant, and does not show the same exquisite distinctness of separate tower and spire and palace. But yet such comparison is mere carping. Who can wish for a sight more divinely suave and fair than this from the bench above Fiesole? Not a breath of smoke dares to hang about the glorious old town, dimming its lustre, and between them and it what a spread of manifold colour, of more "mingled hue" than the rainbow's "purfled scarf doth show!" The moon-tinted olives, twilight and ghostly, even in the dazzling radiance of this superb morning hour, with the blinding green of the young corn about their gray feet, the cypress taper-flames, the gay white houses, terrace gardened, and, above all, the vast smile of the Tuscan heaven.
At first Amelia's muteness seems natural and grateful to Jim, as the outcome of the awe and hush that exceeding beauty breathes on the human heart, but by-and-by, as it is prolonged beyond the limits that seem to him fit or agreeable, it begins to get on his nerves. After having so genuinely and wantonly alarmed him, has she brought him here, without any expressions of regret or remorse, simply to steep herself in a silent luxury of selfish enjoyment? After brooding resentfully on this idea for a considerable time, he translates it into speech.
"I thought that you had something to say to me?"
It seems as if her soul had gone out into the sun and April-painted champaign country, and that it is only with an effort and a sigh that she fetches it home again:
"So I have."
"And how much longer am I to wait for it?"
There is no indication of any capacity for patience in his tone.
She brings her look back from the shining morning city, and fixes it wistfully upon him.
"Are you in such a hurry to hear?"
The pathetic streak in her voice, instead of conciliating, chafes him. What is the sense of this paraphernalia of preliminaries? Why not come to the point at once? if indeed there is a point—a fact of which he begins to entertain grave doubts.
"I do not know what you call hurry," he replies drily; "I have been awaiting this mystic utterance for sixteen or seventeen hours."
Her sallow cheek takes on a pinky tinge of mortification at his accent.
"You are quite right," she answers quickly; "I have no business to keep you waiting. I meant to tell you as soon as we got here; I asked you to bring me here on purpose, only——"
"You told me that you must make the communication at some place where it would not matter if you did break down," says he, rather harshly helping her memory; "you must allow that that was not an encouraging exordium. Do you look upon this"—glancing ironically round—"as a particularly suitable place for breaking down?"
Again that pain-evidencing wave of colour flows into her face. There is such an unloving mockery in his displeased voice.
"I shall not break down," she replies, forcing herself to speak with quiet composure; "you need not be afraid that I shall. I know that yesterday I was foolish enough to say the very words you quote, but I was not quite myself then; I did not quite know what I was saying; I had only just heard it."
"It?What IT? Is this a new riddle? For Heaven's sake let us hear the answer to the first before we embark on any fresh one!"
"It is no riddle," replies she, her low patient tones contrasting with his exasperated ones, "nothing could be plainer; it was only that I happened to overhear something rather—rather painful—something that was not intended for me."
His angry cheek blanches as his thought flies arrow-quick to the one subject of his perennial apprehension. Someone has been poisoning her ear with cowardly libels, or yet more dreadful truths about Elizabeth Le Marchant. For a moment or two his tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth, then he says in a tone which he uselessly tries to make one of calm contempt alone:
"If you had lived longer in Florence, you would know how much importance to attach to its tittle-tattle andcancans."
She shakes her head with a sorrowful obstinacy.
"This was no tittle-tattle—nocancan."
Her answer seems but to confirm him in this first horrible suspicion.
"It is astonishing," he says, in a strangled voice, "how ready even the best women are to believe evil; what—what evidence have you of the truth of—of these precious stories?"
"What evidence?" she repeats, fastening her sad eyes upon him—"the evidence of my own heart. I realize now that I have known it all along."
Read by the light of his fears, this response is so enigmatic that it dawns upon him with a flash of inexpressible solace that perhaps he may be on the wrong track after all. His ideas are precipitated into such a state of confusion by this blessed possibility that he can only echo in a stupefied tone:
"Have known what all along?"
She has turned round on the stone bench upon which they have hitherto been sitting side by side, and, as he in the eagerness of his listening has done the same thing, they are now opposite to one another, and he feels as well as sees her hungry eyes devouring his face.
"That you are sick of me," she answers, in a heart-wrung whisper, "sick to death of me—that was what she said."
It is impossible to deny that Burgoyne's first impulse is one of relief. He has been mistaken, then. Elizabeth's secret is in the same state of precarious safety as her enemy's departure from Florence had left it in. His second impulse—our second impulses are mostly our best ones, equally free from the headlongness of our first, and the cold worldly wisdom of our third—is one of genuine indignation, concern, and amazement.
"What who said?"
"Mrs. Byng."
His stupefaction deepens.
"Mrs. Byng—Mrs. Byng told you that I was sick of you? Sick to death of you?"
"Oh, no," she cries, even her emotion giving way to her eagerness to correct this misapprehension, "she did not tellmeso! How could you imagine such a thing? She is far, far too kind-hearted; she would not hurt a fly intentionally, and would be exceedingly pained if she thought I had overheard her."
He shrugs his shoulders despairingly.
"Je m'y perds!She told you, and she did not tell you; you heard, and you did not hear."
"I am telling it very stupidly, I know," she says apologetically, "very confusedly; and of course I can't expect you to understand by instinct how it was." She sighs profoundly, and then goes on quickly, and no longer looking at him. "You know she took me to the party, but when we reached the villa, I found that she knew so many people, and I so few, that I should only be a burden to her if I kept continually by her side, and as I was rather tired—you know that I had not been in bed for two or three nights—I thought I would go into the house and rest, so as to be quite fresh by the time you came. I fancied it was not unlikely you might be a little late."
His conscience, at the unintentional reproach of this patient supposition, reminds him of its existence by a sharp prick. How many times has her poor vanity suffered the bruise of being long first at the rendezvous?
"I discovered that chair by the window under the curtain, the one where you found me."
"Well?"
"It was so quiet there, as everybody was in the garden, that I suppose I fell asleep; at least I remember nothing more until suddenly I heard Mrs. Byng's voice saying——"
"Saying what?"
"Her son was with her—he had brought her in to have some tea; it was to him that she was speaking; she was asking him about me, where I was? where he had left me? whether he had seen me lately? And then she said, 'Poor Amelia, Jim really does neglect her shamefully; and yet one cannot help being sorry for him, too; it was such child-stealing in the first instance, and he is evidently dead-sick of her! It is so astonishing that she does not see it!'"
There is something almost terrible in the calm distinctness with which Amelia repeats the sentences that had laid the card-house of her happiness in the dust. Certainly she keeps her promise to him to the letter; she gives no lightest sign of breaking down. There is not a tear in her eye, not a quiver in her voice. After a moment's pause, she continues:
"And then he, Mr. Byng, answered, 'Poor soul, it—itisodd! She must have the hide of a hippopotamus.'"
Amelia has finished her narrative, repeating the young man's galling comment, with the same composure as his mother's humiliatingly compassionate ones; and for a space her sole auditor is absolutely incapable of making any criticism upon it. He is forbidden, if he had wished it, to offer her even the mute amends of a dumb endearment, by the reappearance on the scene of a couple of the sun-scorched peasant torments with their straw hand-screens. It is not likely that those so lately bought should have worn out already; but yet they renew their importunities with such a determined obstinacy, as if they knew this to be the case; and it is not until they are lightened of two more, that they consent once again to retire, leaving the warm bright plateau to the lovers—if indeed they can be called such.
"True, be it said, whatever man it said,That love with gall and honey doth abound;But if the one be with the other way'd,For every dram of honey therein foundA pound of gall doth over it redound."
"True, be it said, whatever man it said,That love with gall and honey doth abound;But if the one be with the other way'd,For every dram of honey therein foundA pound of gall doth over it redound."
"She was perfectly right," says Amelia, still speaking quite quietly; "it is astonishing that I should not have seen it; and itwaschild-stealing; you were barely twenty-one, and I—I was not very young for a woman even then—I was twenty-three. I ought to have known better."
For once in his life Burgoyne is absolutely bereft of speech. It is always a difficult matter to rebut a charge of being dead sick of a woman without conveying an insult in the very denial; and when there lies a horrid substratum of truth under the exaggeration of the accusation, the difficulty becomes an impossibility.
"However, it might have been much worse," continues Miss Wilson; "just think if I had overheard it only after I had married you, when I knew that there was nothing but death that could rid you of me. I thank God I have heard it in time."
His throat is still too dry for him to speak; but he stretches out his arm to encircle her in a mute protest at that thanksgiving over her own shipwreck; but, for the first time in her life, she eludes his caress.
"Child-stealing," she repeats, under her breath; "and yet"—with a touching impulse of apology and deprecation—"you seemed old for your age; you seemed so much in earnest; I think you really were;"—a wistful pause—"and afterwards, though of course I could not help seeing that I was not to you what you were to me, yet I thought—I hoped that if I waited—if I was patient—if no one else—no one more worthy of you came between us"—another and still wistfuller delay in her halting speech—"you might grow a little fond of me, out of long habit; I never expected you to be more than a little fond of me!"
He has entirely hidden his face in his two hands, so that she is without that index to guide her as to the effect produced by her words, and he continues completely silent. Whether, even after her rude awakening, she still, deep in her heart, cherishes some pale hope of a denial, an explaining away of the reported utterances, who shall say? It is with a half-choked sigh that she goes on:
"But you could not; I am not so unjust as not to know that you tried your best. Poor fellow! it must have been uphill work for you"—with a first touch of bitterness—"labouringto love me, for eight years; is it any wonder that you failed? and I was so thick-skinned I did not see it—the 'hide of a hippopotamus' indeed! There could not be a juster comparison; and now all I can do is to beg your pardon for having spoilt eight of your best years—your best years"—with slow iteration; "but come"—more lightly—"you have some very good ones left too; you are still quite young; for a man you are quite young; the harm I have done you is not irreparable; I think"—with an accent of reproach—"you might ease my mind by telling me that the harm I have done you is not irreparable!"
Thus appealed to, it is impossible for him any longer to maintain his attitude of disguise and concealment. His hands must needs be withdrawn from before his face; and, as he turns that face towards her, she perceives with astonishment, almost consternation, that there is an undoubted tear in each of his hard gray eyes.
"And what about the harm I have done to you?" he asks under his breath, as if having no confidence in his voice; "what about the eight best years ofyourlife?"
A look of affection, so high and tender and selfless, as to seem to remove her love out of the category of the mortal and the transitory, dawns and grows in her wan face.
"Do not fret about them," she answers soothingly, "they were—they always will have been—the eight best years of my life. They were full of good and pleasant things. Do not forget—I would not for worlds have you forget—I shall never forget myself—that they all came to me through you!"
At her words, most innocent as they are of any intention of producing such an effect, a hot flush of shame rises to his very forehead, as his memory presents to him the successive eras into which these eight good years had divided themselves: six months of headlong boyish passion; six months of cooling fever; and seven years of careless, intermittent, matter-of-course, half-tenderness.
"Throughme?" he repeats, with an accent of the deepest self-abasement; "you do not mean to be ironical, dear; you were never such a thing in your life; you could not be if you tried; but if you knew what asweepyou make me feel when you say the sort of thing you have just said!—and so it is all to come to an end, is it? Good as these eight years have been, you have had enough of them? You do not want any more like them?"
She says neither yes nor no. He remains unanswered, unless the faint smile in her weary eyes and about her drooped mouth can count for a reply.
"And all because you have heard some fool say that I was tired of you?"
The tight smile spreads a little wider, and invades her pale cheeks.
"Worse than tired!sick! sick to death!"
She is looking straight before her, at the landscape simmering in the climbing sun, the divine landscape new and young as it was before duomo and bell-tower sprang and towered heavenwards. Why should her gaze dwell any more upon him? She has renounced him, her eyes must fain renounce him too. As he hears her words, as he watches her patient profile, the sole suffering thing in the universal morning joy, a great revulsion of feeling, a great compassion mixed with as large a remorse pours in torrent over his heart. These emotions are so strong that they make him deceive even himself as to their nature. It seems to him as if scales had suddenly fallen from his eyes, showing him how profoundly he prizes the now departing good, telling him that life can neither ask nor give anything better than the undemanding, selfless, boundless love about to withdraw its shelter from him. His arm steals round her waist, and not once does it flash across his mind—as, to his shame be it spoken, it has often flashed before—what a long way it has to steal!
"Am I sick of you, Amelia?"
She makes no effort to release herself. It does him no harm that she should once more rest within his clasp. But she still looks straight before her at lucent Firenze and her olives, and says three times, accompanying each repetition of the word with a sorrowful little head-shake:
"Yes!yes!YES!"
He will compel her to look at him, his own Amelia. Have not all her tender looks been his for eight long years? He puts out his disengaged hand, and with it determinately turns her poor quivering face round so as to meet his gaze.
"Am I sick of you, Amelia?"
In the emotion of the moment, it appears to him as if there were something almost ludicrously improbable and lying about that accusation, in which, when first brought against him, his guilty soul had admitted more than a grain of truth. Her faded eyes turn to his, like flowers to their sun; the veracity of his voice and of his eager gray orbs—still softened from their habitual severity by the tears that had so lately wet them—making such a hope, as, five minutes ago, she had thought never again to cherish, leap into splendid life in her sick heart.
"Is it possible?" she murmurs, almost inaudibly, "do you mean—that you arenot?"
They go down the hill, past the cottages, and the incurious peasants, hand in hand, her soul running over with a deep joy; and his occupied by an unfamiliar calm, that is yet backed by an ache of remorse, and by—what else? That "else" he himself neither could nor would define. He spends the whole of that day with Amelia, both lunching and dining with her and her family; a course which calls forth expressions of unaffected surprise, not at all tinctured with malice—unless it be in the case of Sybilla, who has never been partial to him—from each of them.
"We have been thinking that Jim was going to jilt you, Amelia!" Cecilia has said with graceful badinage; nor, strange to say, has she been at all offended when Jim has retorted, with equal grace and much superior ill-nature, that on such a subject no one could speak with more authority than she.
The large white stars are making the nightly sky almost as gorgeous as the day's departed majesty had done, ere Jim finds himself back at his hotel. His intention of quietly retreating to his own room is traversed by Byng, who, having evidently been on the watch for him, springs up the stairs, three steps at a time, after him.
"Where have you been all day?" he inquires impatiently.
"At the Anglo-Américain. I wonder you are not tired of always asking the same question and receiving the same answer to it."
"I am not so sure that I should always receive the same answer," replies the other, with a forced laugh—"but stop a bit!"—seeing a decided quickening of speed in his friend's upward movements—"my mother is asking for you; she has been asking for you all the afternoon; she wants to speak to you before she goes."
"Goes?"
"Yes, she is off at seven o'clock to-morrow morning—back to England: she had a telegram to-day to say that her old aunt, the one who brought her up, has had a second stroke. No!"—seeing Jim begin to arrange his features in that decorous shape of grave sympathy which we naturally assume on such occasions—"it is no case of great grief; the poor old woman has been quite silly ever since her last attack; but mother thinks that she ought to be there, at—at the end; to look after things, and so forth."
There is an alertness, a something that expresses the reverse of regret in the tone employed by Mrs. Byng's son in this detailed account of the causes of her imminent departure, which, even if his thoughts had not already sprung in that direction, would have set Burgoyne thinking as to the mode in which the young man before him is likely to employ the liberty that his parent's absence will restore to him.
"I offered to go with her," says Byng, perhaps discerning a portion at least of his companion's disapprobation.
"And she refused?"
Byng looks down, and begins to kick the banisters—they are still on the stairs—idly with one foot.
"Mother is so unselfish that it is always difficult to make out what she really wishes; but—but I do not quite see of what use I should be to her if I did go."
There is a moment's pause; then Burgoyne speaks, in a dry, hortatory elder brother's voice:
"If you take my advice you will go home."
The disinterested counsel of wise elder brothers is not always taken in the spirit it merits; and there is no trace of docile and unquestioning acquiescence in Byng's monosyllabic—
"Why?"
"Because, if you stay here, I think you will most likely get into mischief."
The young man's usually good-humoured eyes give out a blue spark that looks rather like fight.
"The same kind of mischief that you have been getting into during the past week?" he inquires slowly.
The acquaintance with his movements evidenced by this last sentence, no less than the light they throw upon his own motives, stagger Jim, to the extent of making him accept the sneer in total silence. Is not it a richly deserved one? But the sweet-natured Byng is already repenting it; and there is something conciliatory and almost entreating in the spirit of his last remark:
"I do not know what has happened to my mother," he says, lowering his voice; "there is no one less of amauvaise languethan she, as you know; but in the case of——"—he breaks off and begins his sentence afresh; "she has been warning me againstthemagain; I can't find that she has any reason to go upon; but she has taken a violent prejudice againsther. She says that it is one of her instincts; and you—you have done nothing towards setting her right?"
Perhaps it may be that his young friend's reported metaphor of the "hippopotamus hide" has not served to render him any dearer to Jim; but there is certainly no great suavity in his reply:
"Why should I?—it is no concern of mine."
"No concern of yours to stand by and see an angel's white robe besmirched by the foul mire of slander?" cries Byng indignantly, and lapsing into that high-flown mood which never fails to make his more work-a-day companion "see blood."
"When I come across such a disagreeable sight it will be time enough to decide whether I will interfere or not. At present I have not met with anything of the kind," returns he, resolutely putting an end to the dialogue by knocking at Mrs. Byng's portal, within which he is at once admitted.
The door of the bedroom communicating with thesalonis open, and through it he sees the lady he has come to visit standing surrounded by gaping dress-baskets, strewn raiment, and scattered papers; all the uncomfortable litter that speaks of an imminent departure. She joins him at once, and, shutting the door behind her, sits down with a fagged air.
"I hear," he begins—"Willy tells me—I am very sorry to hear——"
"Oh, there is no great cause for sorrow," rejoins she quickly, as if anxious to disclaim a grief which might be supposed to check or limit her conversation—"poor dear old auntie!—the people who love her best could not wish to keep her in the state she has been in for the last year; oh, dear!"—sighing—"how very dismal the dregs of life are! do not you hope, Jim, that we shall die before we come to be 'happy releases'?"
"I do indeed," replies he gravely; "I expect to be sick—dead-sick of life long before I reach that stage of it."
He looks at her resentfully as she speaks, but she has so entirely forgotten her own application of the accented adjectives to his feelings for Amelia, that she replies only by a rather puzzled but perfectly innocent glance.
"I never was so unwilling to leave any place in my life," she goes on presently, pursuing her own train of thought; "I do not know how to describe it—a sort of presentiment."
He smiles.
"And yet I do not think that there are any owls in the Piazza to hoot under your windows!"
"Perhaps not," rejoins she, with some warmth; "but what is still more unlucky than that happened to me last night; they passed the wine the wrong way round the table at the MacIvors. I was on thorns!"
"And you think that the wine going the wrong way round the table gave your aunt a stroke?" inquires Jim, with an irritating air of asking for information.
Mrs. Byng reddens slightly.
"I think nothing of the kind; I draw no inference; I only state a fact; itisa very unlucky thing to send the wine round the wrong way: if you had not spent your life among grizzly bears and cannibals you would have known it too!"
"There are no cannibals in the Rocky Mountains," corrects Jim quietly; and then they both laugh, and recommence their talk on a more friendly footing.
"I am not at all happy about Willy."
"No?"
"It is not his health so much—his colour is good, and his appetite not bad."
"Except the Fat Boy in 'Pickwick,' I never heard of anyone who had a better."
"But he is not himself; there is something odd about him!"
"Indeed!"
"Have not you noticed it yourself?—do not you think that there is something odd about him? Does not he strike you as odd?"
"Odd?" repeats Burgoyne slowly, reflecting in how extremely commonplace a light both the virtues and vices of his fellow-traveller have always presented themselves to him; "it would never have occurred to me that Willy wasodd; I cannot"—smiling—"encourage you in the idea that you have added one to the number of the world's eccentrics."
She sighs rather impatiently at his apparently intentional misunderstanding of her drift.
"'Children are avenues to misfortune,' as somebody said, and I think that, whoever he was, he was right. 'If Jacob take a wife of the daughters of Heth, such as are those in the land, what good shall my life do to me?'"
"Why should you credit Jacob with any such intention?"
"I do not half like leaving him here by himself."
"By himself?You count me as no one then?"
"Oh yes, I do—I count you as a great deal; that is why I was so anxious to speak to you before I went; of course I do not expect you to take upon yourself the whole responsibility of him, but you might keep an eye upon him."
He shrugs his shoulders.
"As I have to keep the other eye upon myself, I am afraid that the effort would but make me squint."
"It is his own generosity that I am afraid of—his self-sacrificing impulses; I am always in terror of his marrying someone out of pure good-nature, just to oblige her, just because she looked as if she wished it."
"Stevenson thinks that it does not much matter whom we marry, whether 'noisy scullions,' or 'acidulous vestals.'"
"I do not care what Stevenson thinks: ever since Willy was in Eton jackets, I have had a nightmare of his bringing me home as daughter-in-law some poor little governess with her nose through her veil, and her fingers through her gloves!"
Burgoyne smiles involuntarily as a vision of Elizabeth's daintily-clad hands flashes before his mental eye.
"I think you overrate his magnanimity; I never saw him at all tender to anyone whose gloves were not beyond suspicion."
Mrs. Byng laughs constrainedly.
"Well, if she has not holes in her gloves, she may have holes in her reputation, which is worse."
Jim draws in his breath hard. The tug of war is coming, as the preceding leading remark, lugged in by the head and shoulders, sufficiently evidences. At all events he will do nothing to make its approach easier or quicker. He awaits it in silence.
"These Le Marchants—as they are friends of yours—I suppose that I ought not to say anything against them?"
"I am sure that you are too well-bred to do anything of the kind," replies he precipitately, with a determined effort to stop her mouth with a compliment, which she is equally determined not to deserve.
"I do not think I am; I am only well-bred now and then, when it suits me; I am not going to be well-bred to-night."
"I am sorry to hear it."
"Whether they are friends of yours or not, I do not like them."
"I do not think that that matters much, either to you or to them."
"I have an instinct that they are adventuresses."
"I know for a certainty "—with growing warmth—"that they are nothing of the kind."
"Then why do not they go out anywhere?"
"Because they do not choose."
"Because no one asks them, more likely! Why were they so determined not to be introduced to me?"
"How can I tell? Perhaps"—with a wrathful laugh—"they did not like your looks!"
She echoes his false mirth with no inferior exasperation.
"Who is ill-bred now?"
Her tone calls him back to a sense of the ungentleman-likeness and puerility of his conduct.
"I!"—he replies contritely—"undoubtedly I! but——"
"Do not apologize," interrupts she, recovering her equanimity with that ease which she has transmitted to her son; "I like you for standing up for them if theyareyour friends; and I hope that you will do the same good office for me when someone sticks pins into me behind my back; but come now, let us be rational; surely we may talk quietly about them without insulting each other, may not we?"
"I do not know; we can try."
"I suppose"—a little ironically—"that you are not so sensitive about them but that you can bear me to ask a few perfectly harmless questions?"
He writhes. "Of course! of course! what are they to me?—they are nothing to me!"
A look of incredulity, which she perhaps does not take any very great pains to conceal, spreads over her face.
"Then you really will be doing me a great service if you tell me just exactly all you know about them, good and bad."
"All I know about them," replies Jim in a rapid parrot-voice, as if he were rattling over some disagreeable lesson—"is that they were extremely kind to me ten years ago; that they had a beautiful place in Devonshire, and were universally loved and respected: I hear that they have let their place; so no doubt they are not so much loved and respected as they were; and now you know as much about the matter as I do!"
"Welcome ever smiles; and Farewell goes out sighing."
"Welcome ever smiles; and Farewell goes out sighing."
This last clause is not always true. For example, there is very little sighing in the farewells made to Mrs. Byng by the two young men who see her off at the Florence Railway Station. And Mrs. Byng herself has been too much occupied in manœuvring to get a few last private words with each of her escort to have much time for sighing either.
She would have been wounded if her old friend Jim had not come to see the last of her, and she would have been broken-hearted if her son had not paid her this final attention; and yet each necessarily destroys thetête-à-têteshe is burning to have with the other. It is indelicate to implore your adored child not to go to the devil in the presence of an intimate friend, and it would give a not unnatural umbrage to that child if you urged the guardian friend to check his downward tendency while he himself is standing by. Nor do her two companions at all aid her in her strategy; rather, they show a tendency to unite in baffling her, hanging together round her like a bodyguard, and effectually hindering the last words which she is pining to administer. Only once for a very few minutes does she succeed in outwitting them, when she despatches Willy to the bookstall to buy papers for her—an errand from which he returns with an exasperating celerity. The instant that his back is turned, Mrs. Byng addresses her companion in an eager voice of hurry and prayer:
"You will keep an eye upon him?"
Silence.
"You will keep an eye upon him—promise?"
"I do not know what 'keeping an eye upon him' means in your vocabulary; often you and I do not use the same dictionary; until I know, I will not promise."
"You will look after him;do, Jim!"
"My dear madam"—with irritation—"let me go and buy your papers; and meanwhile urgehimto look afterme; I assure you that it is quite as necessary."
"Fiddlesticks, with your unimaginative, unemotional nature——"
"H'm!"
"Your head will always take care of your heart."
"Will it?"
"While he—promise me at least that, if you see him rushing to his ruin, you will telegraph to me?"
"Certainly, if you wish it; I will telegraph, 'Willy rushing Ruin.' At five-and-twenty centimes a word, it will cost you sevenpence halfpenny; not dear at the price, is it?"
The mother reddens.
"You have become a verymauvais plaisantof late, Jim; oh dear me! here he is back again, tiresome boy!"
It is with feelings tied into a knot of complications, which he scarcely seeks to unravel, that Burgoyne walks away from the station, and from the good-natured staunch woman, whose last few moments in fair Firenze he has done his best to embitter. He is glad that she is gone, and he is sorry that she is gone. He is remorseful at his gladness, and he is ashamed of his sorrow, knowing and acknowledging that it results from no regret for her companionship, which he had been wont to prize; but to the consciousness that she had stood like an angel with a drawn sword between her son and the Piazza d'Azeglio. Both angel and drawn sword are steaming away now, covered by a handsome travelling cloak down to the heels in acoupé toilette, and the road to the Piazza lies naked and undefended, open to the light feet that are so buoyantly treading the flags beside him.
The step of youth is always light, but there is something aggressively springy in Byng's this morning; and though he does notsayanything offensively cheerful, there is a ring in his voice that makes his kind friend long to hit him. He, the kind friend, is thankful when their ways part, without his having done him any bodily violence.
"You are late to-day," says Cecilia, as he enters thesalon, giving him a nod of indifferent friendliness, while Sybilla crossly asks him to shut the door more quietly, and Amelia lays her hand lingeringly in his, with a silent smile of rapture; "we began to think you had had a relapse. I was just telling Amelia that the pace had been too good to last—ha, ha!"
Burgoyne has always found it difficult to laugh at Cecilia's jokes, and his now perfect intimacy with her relieves him from the necessity of even feigning to do so.
"I have been seeing Mrs. Byng off," he replies, with that slight shade of awkwardness in his tone which has accompanied his every mention of the mother or son since his explanation with his betrothed.
"You let her go without getting that wedding present out of her, after all?" cries Cecilia, who is in a rather tryingly playful mood.
"Gone, is she?" says Sybilla, with a somewhat ostentatious sigh of resentful relief; "well, I, for one, shall not cry. I am afraid that she was not verysimpaticato me; she was so dreadfully robust. Perhaps, now that she is no longer here to monopolise him, we shall be allowed to see something more of that nice boy."
No one answers. Not one of her three listeners is at the moment disposed to chant or even echo praises of the "nice boy." Sybilla perversely pursues the subject.
"I dare say that he has a delicacy about coming without a special invitation," she says, "where there is an invalid; but you might tell him that on my good days no one is more pleased to see their friends than I; it does not even send my temperature up; you might tell him that on my good days Dr. Coldstream says it does not even send my temperature up!"
Again no one answers.
"You do not seem to be listening to what I am saying," cries Sybilla fractiously; "will you please tell him, Jim?"
Jim lifts his heavy eyes from the ugly carpet on which they have been resting, and looks distastefully back at her.
"I do not think that I will, Sybilla," he replies slowly; "I do not think he cares a straw whether your temperature goes up or down. I think that he does not come here because—because he has found metal more attractive elsewhere."
He makes this statement for no other reason than because it is so intensely unpleasant to him, because he realizes that he must have to face the fact it embodies, and to present it not only to himself, but to others. And each day that passes proves to him more and more conclusively that itisa fact. He asks Byng no question as to the disposition of his day. He sees but little of him, having, indeed, changed the hours of his own breakfast and dinner in order to avoid having his appetite spoilt by the sight of so much unnecessary radiance opposite him; but he knocks up against him, flower-laden, at the Strozzi steps; he notes the splendour of his ties and waistcoats; he grows to know theElizabeth-lookon his face, when he comes singing home at evening, as one knows the look of the western clouds that the sun's red lips have only just ceased to kiss, though no sun is any longer in sight; and yet he does not interfere. He has received from the young man's mother a hasty letter, pencilled in the train, not an hour after she had quitted him; another more leisurely, yet as anxious, from Turin; a third from Paris, and lastly a telegram from Charing Cross. All bear the same purport.
"Write; keep an eye upon him!" "Write; keep an eye upon him! Write!"
And yet, though a full week has passed, though he sees the son of his old ally drifting, faster than ever autumn leaf drifted on a flush October river, to the whirlpool she had dreaded for him, yet he sends her never a word. He writes her long letters, it is true, covers telegram-forms with pregnant messages, but they all find their ultimate home in the wood fire. When the moment comes, he finds it impossible to send them, since, upon searching his heart for the motives that have dictated them, he finds those motives to be no fidelity to an ancient friendship, no care for the boy's welfare, but, simply and nakedly, the satisfaction of his own spite, the easing of his own bitter jealousy.
So the Florentine post goes out daily, bearing no tale of Byng's backslidings to his native land, and Jim, brushing past him, answering him curtly, never going nearer to the Piazza d'Azeglio than the Innocenti—a good long street off—devotes himself to the frantic prosecution of a suit long since won, to the conquest of a heart for eight weary years hopelessly, irrecoverably, pitiably his. His presence at the Anglo-Américain is so incessant, and his monopolizing of Amelia so unreasonable, that Sybilla—for the first time in her life really a little neglected—alternately runs up her pulse to 170 and drops it to 40.
"And then you wonder that I am anxious to be married," says Cecilia, accompanying her future brother-in-law to the door, on the day on which the latter phenomenon has occurred, and wiping the angry tears from her plump cheeks. "I make no secret of it, Iammadly anxious, I would marry anyone, I am desperate. Just think what my life will be when Amelia is gone; and though of course I shall be a great deal with her—she has promised that I shall be almost always with her" (Jim winces)—"yet of course it can't be the same thing as having a home of your own."
"We will do our best for you," replies he, with a rather rueful smile and a sense of degradation; "but you know, my dear Cis, anybody can lead a horse to the water, but it is not so easy to make him drink."
"That is quite true," replies Cecilia, one of whose most salient merits is an extreme unreadiness to be affronted, wiping her eyes as she speaks, "and I have no luck; such promising things turn up, and then come to nothing. Now, that clergyman the other day, whom we met at the Villa Careggi—such a pleasant gentlemanlike man—he was on the look-out for a wife, he told me so himself, and I know so much about the working of a parish, and next day he was off, Heaven knows where!"
Jim gives a slight shudder.
"I do not think you had any great loss in him," he says hastily; then, seeing her surprised air, "I mean, you know, that it is always said that a man is a better judge of another man than a woman is, and I did not like his looks; give us time, and we will do better for you than that."
Cecilia can no longer accuse her future relation of any slackness in the matter of expeditions. There is something of fever in the way in which he arrives each morning, armed with some new plan for the day, giving no one any peace until his project is carried out. It seems as if he must crowd into the last fortnight of Amelia's stay in Florence all the sight-seeing, all the junkets, all the enjoyment which ought to have been temperately spread over the eight years of their engagement.
One day—all nearer excursions being exhausted—they drive to Monte Senario, that sweet and silent spot, happily too far from Florence for the swarm of tourists to invade, where earth-weary men have set up a rest scarcely less dumb than the grave in a lonely monastery of the Order of La Trappe. Through the Porta San Gallo, along the Bologna Road they go. It is a soft summer morning, with not much sun. Up, past the villas and gardens, where the Banksia roses and wistarias are rioting over wall, and berceau and pergola, climbing even the tall trees. Round the very head of one young poplar two rose-trees—a yellow and a white one—are flinging their arms; flowered so lavishly that hardly a pin's point could be put between the blossoms. Up and up, a white wall on either hand. The dust lies a foot thick on the road; thick too on the monthly roses, just breaking into full pink flush; thick on themselves as the endless mulecarts come jingling down the hill with bells and red tassels, and a general air of what would be jollity were not that feeling so given the lie to by the poor jaded, suffering beasts. Up and up, till they leave stone walls and villas and oliveyards behind them, and are away among the mountains. At a very humble little house that has no air of an inn they leave the carriage, and climb up a rocky road, and through a perfumed pine-wood, to where the Trappist Monastery stands, in its perfect silence and isolation, on its hilltop, looking over its fir-woods at the ranges of the Apennines, lying one behind the other in the stillness of the summer-day; looking to distant Florence, misty and indistinct in her Arno plain; looking to Fiesole, dwarfed to a molehill's dimensions.
"I am told that one of the brothers is an Englishman; I did not hear his name, but he is certainly English," says Cecilia, as they mount the shallow, grass-grown steps to the monastery door. "If I send up word that I am a fellow-countrywoman, perhaps he will come out and speak to me; I am sure that it would be a very nice change for him, poor fellow!"
And it is the measure of the amount of Cecilia's acquaintance with the rules of the Order, that it is only half in jest that she makes the suggestion. But she does not repeat it to the lay-brother who stands, civil yet prohibitory, at the top of the flight, and who, in answer to Burgoyne's halting questions as to where they may go, politely answers that they may go anywhere—anywhere,bien entendu, outside. So they wander aimlessly away. They push open a rickety gate, and passing an old dog, barking angry remonstrances at them from the retirement of a barrel, step along a grassy path that leads they know not whither. Two more young lay-brothers meet them, with their hands full of leopard's-bane flowers, which they have been gathering, probably to deck their altar with.
Amelia has passed her hand through Jim's arm—since his late increased kindness to her she has been led to many more little freedoms with him than she had hitherto permitted herself—and though she is very careful not to lean heavily or troublesomely upon him, yet the slight contact of her fingers keeps him reminded that she is there. Perhaps it is as well, since to-day he is conscious of such a strange tendency to forget everything, past, present, and to come. Has one of the monks' numb hands been laid upon his heart to lull it into so frozen a quiet? To-day he feels as if it were absolutely impossible to him to experience either pleasure or pain; as if to hold Elizabeth in his own arms, or see her in Byng's, would be to him equally indifferent. His apathy in this latter respect is to be put to the test sooner than he expects. Not indeed that Elizabeth is lying in Byng's arms—it would be a gross misrepresentation to say so, she being, on the contrary, most decorously poised on a camp-stool—least romantic of human resting places—when they come suddenly upon her and him in the course of their prowl round the inhospitable walls. She is sitting on her camp-stool, and he is lying on his face in the grass, just not touching her slim feet.
The advancing party perceive the couple advanced upon before the latter are aware of their nearness; long enough for the former to realize how very muchde tropthey will be, yet not long enough to enable them to escape unnoticed. Jim becomes aware of the very second at which Amelia recognises the unconscious pair, by an involuntary pinch of her fingers upon his arm, which a moment later she hastily drops. His own first feeling on catching sight of them—no, not hisveryfirst—his very first is as if someone had run a darning-needle into his heart—but almost his first is to shout out to them in loud warning:
"Be on your guard! we are close to you!"
He will never forgive either himself or them if they ignorantly indulge in any endearment under his very eyes. But they do not. There are no interlacing arms to disentwine, nothing to make them spring apart, when at length they look up and take in the fact—an unwelcome fact it must needs be—of their invasion.
On hearing approaching footsteps, Byng rolls over on his back in the grass; on perceiving that most of the footsteps are those of ladies, he springs to his feet. Elizabeth remains sitting on her camp-stool.
"What a coincidence!" cries Cecilia, breaking into a laugh.
They are all grateful to her for the remark, though it is rather a silly one, as there is no particular coincidence in the case. Burgoyne is irritatedly conscious that Amelia is covertly observing him, and before he can check himself he has thrown over his shoulder at her one of those snubbing glances from which, for the last ten days, he has painstakenly and remorsefully refrained. It is not a happy moment to look at poor Amelia, as she has not yet cooled down from the heat of her climb through the fir-wood—a heat that translates itself into patchy flushes all over her face, not sparing even her forehead. Elizabeth is flushed too. She has not met Miss Wilson since she had declined Burgoyne's offer of bringing his betrothed to see her, and in her deprecating eyes there is a guilty and tremulous recollection of this fact. But below the guilt and the deprecation and the tremor, what else is there in Elizabeth's eyes? What of splendid and startling, and that comes but once in a lifetime? Rather than be obliged to give a name to that vague radiance, Jim turns his look back upon his own too glowing dear one.
"Did you come here all alone? You two all alone? What fun!" asks Cecilia, with an air of delighted curiosity.
Again her companions inwardly thank her. It is the question that both—though with different degrees of eagerness—have been thirsting to ask.
"Alone?—oh no!" replies Elizabeth, with that uneasy, frightened look that Burgoyne has always noticed on her face when she has been brought into unwilling relation with strangers. "My mother is here—she came with us; why, where is she?"—looking round with a startled air—"she was here a moment ago."
A grim smile curves Jim's mouth. It is evident that the unhappy Mrs. Le Marchant, worn out with herrôleof duenna, has slipped away without being missed by either of her companions. Would they have even discovered her absence but for Cecilia's query?
"Mrs. Le Marchant was here a moment ago," echoes Byng, addressing the company generally; "but"—dodging his friend's eyes—"she said she was a little stiff from sitting so long; she must be quite close by."
"I will go and look for her," says Elizabeth, confused, and rising from her rickety seat as she speaks; but Amelia, who is nearest to her, puts out a friendly hand in prohibition.
"Oh, do not stir!" she cries, smiling kindly and admiringly. "You look so comfortable. Letmego and search for Mrs. Le Marchant; I—I—should be afraid to sit down, I am so hot. I should like to find her; Cecilia will help me, and Mr. Byng will show us the way."
It is not always that generous actions meet their meed of gratitude from those for whose sake they are performed; and, though Burgoyne recognises the magnanimity of hisfiancée'sline of conduct, thankfulness to her for it is not the feeling uppermost in his mind when, a few moments later, he finds himself standing in uneasytête-à-têteover the seated Elizabeth.
"Will not you sit down?" she asks presently, adding, with a low, timid laugh, "I do not know why I should invite you, as if"—glancing round at the sun-steeped panorama—"this were my drawing-room."
He complies, taking care to occupy a quite different six feet of herbage from that which still bears the imprint of Byng's lengthy limbs. The grass grows cool and fresh, full of buttercups and tall blue bugle; out of them the gray monastery wall rises, in its utter lifeless silence, with its small barred windows. Was ever any building, within which is human life, so unutterably still? As he leans his elbow among the king-cups, Jim says to himself that the lovers had chosen their place well and wisely—that the consciousness of the austere, denied lives going on so close behind them, in their entire joylessness, must have given an added point, a keener edge to the poignancy of their own enjoyment of the sweet summer day outside.
"You have not been to see us for a long time," says Elizabeth presently, in a small and diffident voice, after having waited until the probability of his speaking first has become a mere possibility, and even that a faint one.
He replies baldly, "No."
His look is fixed on a knoll, whence the monks must have gathered their leopard's bane. They cannot have gathered much, so bounteously do the gay yellow flowers still wave on the hillock. Nearer stands a colony of purple orchises, and from them the eye travels away to the silent fir-wood, to the range of misty hills and the distant plain, touched now and again by a vague hint of sunshine, that makes one for the moment feel sure that one has detected Duomo or Campanile. How many hill ranges there are! One can count six or seven, like the ridges in a gigantic ploughed field, one behind another—all solemnly beautiful on this windless day of grave and ungaudy sweetness. Has the young man been reckoning the ranks of the Apennines, that it is so long before he adds a low-voiced, mocking question to his monosyllable?
"Have you missed me very much?"
The woman addressed seems in no hurry to answer. She has drawn her narrow brown brows together, as if in the effort to hit truth in her nicest shade in her answer. Then she speaks with a sort of soft self-remonstrance:
"Oh, surely! Imusthave missed you—you were so extraordinarily, so unaccountably kind to us!"
There is not one of us who would not rather be loved for what wearethan for what wedo; so it is perhaps no wonder if the young woman's reply strikes with an unreasonable chill upon the asker's heart.
"You must have been very little used to kindness all your life," he says, with some brusqueness, "to be so disproportionately grateful for my trumpery civilities."
She hesitates a moment, then:
"You are right," she replies; "I have not received any great kindness in my life—justice, well, yes, I suppose so—but no, not very much mercy."
Her candid and composed admission of a need for mercy whets yet farther that pained curiosity which has always been one of the strongest elements in his uncomfortable interest in her. But the very sharpness of that interest makes him shy away awkwardly from the subject of her past.
"I always think," he says, "that there is something fatuous in a man's apologizing to a lady for not having been to see her, as if the loss were hers, and not his."
"Is there? All the same, I am sorry that you did not come."
This simple and unsophisticated implication of a liking for him would have warmed again the uneasy heart that her former speech had chilled had not he, under the superficial though genuine regret of her face, seen, still shining with steady lustre, that radiance which has as little been called forth by, as it can be dimmed by him or anything relating to him. And so he passes by in silence the expression of that sorrow which he bitterly knows to be so supportable.
The still spirit of the day seems to have touched the very birds. They sing a few low notes in veiled, chastened voices from the fir-wood, and again are silent. The clock tells the hours in quarters to the doomed lives inside the monastery, self-doomed to suffering and penance and incarceration, even with the winning blue of the Tuscan sky above their tonsured heads, with the forget-me-nots pressing their feet, and the nightingales singing endless love-songs to them from the little dark forest nigh at hand.
"I suppose," says Elizabeth presently, in a reflective tone, "that the fact is, when people are in your position—I mean on the brink of a great deep happiness—they forget all lesser things?"
He snatches a hasty glance of suspicion at her. Is this her revenge for his neglect of her? But nothing can look more innocent or less ironical than her small profile, bent towards the gigantic forget-me-nots and the pulmonaria, azure as gentians.
"Perhaps."
"The big fish"—her little face breaking into one of her lovely smiles, which, by a turn of her head from side to full, she offers in its completeness to his gaze—"swallows up all the little gudgeons! Poor little gudgeons."
"Poor little gudgeons!" he echoes stupidly, and then begins to laugh at his own wool-gathering.
"And now I suppose you will be going directly—going home?" pursues she, looking at him and his laughter with a soft surprise.
"I hope so; and—and—you too?"
She gives a start, and the sky-coloured nosegay in her hand drops into her lap.
"We—we? Why shouldwego home? We have nothing pleasant to go to, and"—looking round with a passionate relish at mountain, and suffused far plain, and sappy spring grass—"we are so well—so infinitely well here!" Then, pulling herself together, and speaking in a more composed key, "But yes, of course we, too, shall go by-and-by; this cannot last for ever—nothing lasts for ever. That is the one thought that has kept me alive all these years; but now——"
She breaks off.
"But now?"
Even as he watches her, putting this echoed interrogation, he sees the radiance breaking through the cloud his question had gathered, as a very strong sun breaks through a very translucent exhalation.
"But now?" she repeats vaguely, and smiling to herself, forgetful of his very presence beside her—"But now? Did I say 'But now?' Ah, here they are back again!"