CHAPTER XXV.

"The jagOf his mountain crag"

till morning? The morning light will certainly see him tumbling at the least some few kilometres down. He decides generously to leave him in present possession of his peak; but yet, so inconsistent is human nature, his next speech can have no drift but that of giving a slight jog to his friend's towering confidence.

"And your own mother?"

It may generally be concluded that a person has not a very pertinent response to give to a question if his only answer to that question be to repeat it in the same words.

"My own mother?"

"Yes; you will write at once to tell her, I suppose?"

For a second the young man's forehead clouds, then he breaks into an excited laugh.

"Tell her? I should rather think I should! Do you suppose that I shall lose a moment in telling everybody I know—everybody I ever heard of? I want you to tell everybody too—every single soul of your acquaintance!"

"I?"

"Tell Amelia; tell Cecilia"—quite unaware, in his excitement, of the freedom he is taking, for the first time in his life, with those young ladies' Christian names—"tell the other one—the sick one; tell them all! I wantherto feel that all my friends, everybody I know, welcome her—hold out their arms to her. I want them all to tell her they are glad—you most of all, of course, old chap; she will not think it is all right till you have given your consent!"—laughing again with that bubbling-over of superfluous joy. "Do you know—it seems incomprehensible now—but there was a moment when I was madly jealous of you? I was tellingherabout it to-day; we were laughing over it together in the wood."

Burgoyne feels that one more mention of that wood will convert him into a lunatic, quite as indisputable as his companion, only very much more dangerous.

"Indeed!" he says grimly. "I should have thought you might have found a more interesting subject of conversation."

"Perhaps I was not so very far out either"—possibly dimly perceiving, even through the golden haze of his own glory, the lack of enjoyment of his last piece of news conveyed by Jim's tone—"for she has an immense opinion of you. I do not know anyone of whom she has so high an opinion; she says you are so dependable."

The adjective, as applied to himself by Elizabeth and her mother, has not the merit of novelty in the hearer's ears, which is perhaps the reason why the elation that he must naturally feel on hearing it does not translate itself into words.

"So dependable," repeats Byng, apparently pleased with the epithet. "She says you give her the idea of being a sort of rock; you will come to-morrow, and wish her joy, will not you?"

"I am afraid that my wishing it her will not help her much to it," answers Burgoyne, rather sadly; "but I do not think you need much doubt that I do wish it. Joy"—repeating the word over reflectively—"it is a big thing to wish anyone."

The extreme dampness of his tone arrests for a few minutes Byng's jubilant pæan.

"You do not think that my mother will be pleased with the news?" he asks presently, in a changed and hesitating key.

"I do not think about it; I know she will not!"

"I suppose not; and yet"—with an accent of stupefaction—"it is inconceivable that she, who has always shown such a tender sympathy for me in any paltry little bit of luck that has happened to me, should not rejoice with me when all heaven ope——"

"Yes, yes; of course."

"Do you think"—with a gleam of hope—"that my mother may have tried to dissuade me because she thought I was only laying up disappointment for myself—because she thought it so unlikely thatsheshould deign to stoop to me?"

Burgoyne shakes his head.

"Perhaps," he says, with the slowness of a man who is saying what he himself does not believe, "a part of your mother's dislike to the idea may be in the fact of Miss Le Marchant's being older than you."

"Older!" cries Byng, with almost a shout of angry derision at the suggestion. "What have creatures likeherto do with age? I neither know nor care what her age is! If you know, do not tell me! I will not listen! Upon that exquisite body time and change are powerless to work their hideous metamorphoses!"

"Fiddlesticks!" replies Burgoyne gruffly. "If she live long enough, she will be an old woman, and will look like one, I suppose!" though, even as he speaks, he realizes that to him this is almost as incredible as to the young madman whom he is so pitilessly snubbing. "But, however that may be, I think you had better make up your mind to meeting the most resolved opposition on the part of your mother."

"I believe you are right," replies Byng, out of whose voice his kind Mentor has at last succeeded in momentarily conjuring the exaltation. "Her prejudice against them, againsther, always filled me with stupefaction. I never dared trust myself to discuss it with her; I was afraid that if I did I might be led into saying something to her, something I should be sorry for afterwards. Thank God, I have never spoken unkindly to her in all my life!"

"You would have been a sweep if you had!" interjects Jim.

"I never heard her give any reason for it, did you? It was as baseless as it was senseless." After a pause, his voice taking on again its inflection of confident, soaring triumph: "But it cannot last—it is absolutely beyond the wildest bounds of possibility that it can last! After five minutes' talk mother will be at her feet; I know my mother so well! Not one of her exquisite ways will be lost upon her, andshewill do her very best to win her! Jim, I ask you—I put it to you quietly and plainly—I know you think I am mad, but I am not—I am speaking quite rationally and coolly—but I ask you—you, an impartial bystander—do you think that any human being, anything made of flesh and blood, could resisther—herwhen she puts herself out to please—herat her very best?"

As Burgoyne is conscious of not being in a position to answer this question with much satisfaction to himself, he leaves it unanswered.

"Some say the genius soCries 'Come' to him that instantly must die."

A new day has awaked, and Firenze, fresh-washed after yesterday's rain, smelling through all her streets of lilies, laughs up, wistaria-hung, to a fleckless sky. If poor Amelia had but deferred her treat for twenty-four hours, what a different Vallombrosa would she and her companions have carried home in their memories! Amelia's treat!

"I shall not forget Amelia's treat in a hurry!" Burgoyne says to himself, as he sits appetiteless over his solitary breakfast. "I had better go and tell her the result of it."

As he makes this reflection, he rises with some alacrity, and, leaving his scarcely-tasted coffee and his not-at-all-tasted omelette, walks out of thesalle-à-manger. His motive for so early a visit to the Anglo-Américain is less an excessive eagerness to proclaim his piece of news than the thought that by so doing he will, at least for a few hours, escape the necessity of being in his young friend's company. As to where that young friend at present is, whether, after having wandered about the town all night, he is now sleeping late, or whether he is already off to persecute poor Mrs. Le Marchant for that maternal blessing which she has so little inclination to give, Jim is ignorant. All he knows is that such another dose of Byng's erotic eloquence as he had to swallow last night will leave him (Burgoyne) either a murderer or suicide.

Owing to his arrival at the Anglo-Américain so much sooner than usual, he finds himself coming in for the ceremony of Sybilla's installation for the day in the drawing-room. There is always a little pomp and fussy bustle about this rite. Sybilla totters in (grave doubts have occasionally crossed the minds of her family as to whether she does not in reality possess a pair of excellent and thoroughly dependable legs), supported on one side by Amelia and on the other by her maid. Cecilia goes before with an air cushion, and Mr. Wilson follows, when he does not turn restive—which is sometimes the case—with a duvet. To-day, as I have said, this rite is in full celebration when Jim arrives, but it is being performed with mutilated glories. The rite is going forward, but the high priest is absent. That ministrant, upon whose arm the sufferer is wont to lean far the most heavily; she upon whom devolves the whole responsibility of arranging the three cushions behind the long limp back; the properly covering the languid feet; the nice administering of the reviving cordial drops that are to repair the fatigue of the transit from bedroom to sitting-room—that most important and unfailing ministrant is nowhere to be seen. No artist wishes his picture to be viewed in an inchoate, unfinished stage, nor is Sybilla at all anxious to have the public admitted to the sight of that eminent work of art herself until she is stretched in faint, moribund, graceful completeness on her day-bed. At the moment of Burgoyne's entry she has just reached that unbecoming point, where she is sitting sideways on her sofa, before her wasted limbs—Burgoyne is one of those heretics who have never believed that they are wasted—have been carefully lifted into their final posture of extension upon the Austrian blanket. It is, of all moments, the one at which interruption is least welcome; nor is the intruder at all surprised at being greeted by the invalid with a more than sub-acid accent.

"My dear Jim,already! Why you become morematinaleevery day! youarethe early bird indeed! You do not"—with an annoyed laugh—"give us poor worms a chance of being beforehand with you."

"I am very sorry if I am too soon," replies he, his eyes wandering away from the fretful features before him in search of others upon which he knows he shall find written no complaint of his prematureness—"but I came to——Where's Amelia?"

"You may well ask," replies Sybilla, with a sort of hysterical laugh. "It is pretty evident that she is nothere! My dear Cis, would you mind remembering that my head is not made of mahogany? you gave it such a bang with that cushion. I am very sorry to trouble you. The heaviest load a sick person has to bear is the feeling that she is such a burden to those around her; and certainly, my dear, you do not help me to forget it."

"Where is she?" repeats Burgoyne hastily, both because he wants to know, and because he is anxious to strangle in its infancy one of those ignoble family bickerings, to assist at many of which has been the privilege or penalty of his state of intimacy.

"She is not well," replies Cecilia shortly, her rosy face rosier than usual, either with the joy of imminent battle, or with the exertion of swaddling, under protest, the invalid's now elevated legs.

"Not well! Amelia not well," echoes he, in a tone of incredulity.

During all the years of their acquaintance not once has he heard his patient sweetheart complain of ache or pain. Manlike, he has therefore concluded that she can never have felt either.

"It is very thoughtless of her," says Cecilia, with a not altogether amiable laugh, and giving a final irritated slap to Sybilla's coverlet—"considering how much illness we already have in the house; ha! ha! but it is true all the same: she is not well, not at all well; she is in bed."

"In bed!"

"She must have caught a chill yesterday on that disgusting excursion; driving home that long distance in wet shoes and stockings."

"But I thought, I hoped that—I asked her to change them."

"She had them dried in a sort of way; but I could see when she put them on again that they were really wringing wet still. I told her so, but she only answered that even if they were, what matter? she never caught cold. You know that Amelia never thinks that anything matters that concerns herself."

This would be an even handsomer tribute to Amelia than it is, if it did not suggest a secondary intention of administering a back-hander to someone else.

"In the case of my children," says Mr. Wilson, making his voice heard for the first time from the window, where he is discontentedly peering up and down the sheets of a journal through his spectacles, "there seems to be no mean possible between senseless rashness and preposterous self-indulgence."

Mr. Wilson likes his eldest daughter. He is uneasy and upset, and rather angry at her indisposition, and this is his way of showing his paternal tenderness.

"In bed!"

The human animal is the most adaptive of created beings; but even it requires some little time to adjust itself to entirely new conditions of existence.

"Amelia," continues Mr. Wilson, fanning the flame of his ire with the bellows of his own rhetoric, "is the one among you whom I did credit with the possession of a head upon her shoulders, and now here she is wantonly laying herself up!"

"You talk as if she did it on purpose, father," says Cecilia, with an indignant laugh—"as if she enjoyed it. I do not think that anyone, even Sybilla"—with a resentful side-glance at the sofa—"could enjoy having her teeth chattering with cold, her head as heavy as lead, and her knees knocking together under her."

"Good heavens!" cries Jim, his bewildered surprise swallowed up in genuine alarm; "you do not mean to say that she is as bad as that?"

Sybilla laughs, and even in the midst of his real anxiety, Burgoyne has time for the reflection that the Wilson family seem this morning to havese donné le motto show in how many different styles it is possible to be merry without the least tinge of genuine mirth in any.

"My dear Jim, have not you known Cis long enough not to take herau pied de la lettre? Do not you know of old what a magnificent colourist she is?—a perfect Tintoret! Of course Amelia is not quite the thing, poor dear—she has no one but herself to blame for that!—but equally of course, to a colossally healthy person such as she, any little ailment appears a mountain."

This speech is uttered with the accent of such entire conviction that it ought to carry reassurance into the heart of the person to whom it is addressed. Sybilla really and honestly disbelieves in the reality of any claims but her own to sincere sickness. But Jim unreasonably neither is nor feigns to be reassured.

"You have had advice for her? You have sent for Dr. Coldstream?" he asks rapidly of the two sound members of the family, turning his back unceremoniously upon the invalid.

"I was going to send for him at once," answers Cecilia, her own latent anxiety quickened by the evident alarm of her interlocutor, "but Sybilla said it was needless, as in any case he was coming to see her this afternoon."

"I think he wishes to change my medicine," puts in Sybilla in a piano voice, that shows an evident desire to assert her threatened position of prime and only genuine invalid, a sort of "beware of imitations" tone; "he is not quite satisfied with the effect of the last, I think; it has not brought up the pulse and quickened the appetite in the way he hoped. I thought that he might run up and look at Amelia at the end of his visit to me."

"And is it possible," inquires Jim, with some heat, "that you are going to let half a day go by without doing anything for her? I suppose you have not exaggerated, have you?" turning with an earnest appeal in his eyes to Cecilia; "but in any case I am very sure that nothing short of being really and gravely ill would have kept her in bed—she who is always waiting hand and foot upon us all, whom we all allow to spend her life in hewing wood and drawing water for us."

"Send for Dr. Coldstream at once," says Mr. Wilson irritably; "at once, I tell you; he is so very seldom out of the house that I have often thought of suggesting to him to take a room here; and now, on the only occasion on which he is really needed, he is not at hand."

"If you will write the note," says Jim, a shade relieved at having at last succeeded in rousing Amelia's relations to prompt action, and feeling a feverish desire to be doing something, "I will take it at once; it will be the quickest way; I may catch him before he goes out and bring him back with me."

"Do you really think it is necessary?" asks Sybilla, as Jim hustles Cecilia to her writing-table, and stands, nervously fidgeting beside her as she writes; "do you think, if it is only a common cold, as I suspect, that it is quite fair to worry a man who is so run off his legs already? He will probably laugh in your face; still, if you are so set upon it, it is perhaps more satisfactory."

"You need not go into details—just a line—make haste!" cries Jim, hanging tiresomely over Cecilia, rather impeding her than the reverse by his impatience, and leaving entirely unnoticed Sybilla's observation, which indeed has been uttered more to preserve her own self-respect than with much hope that in the present wrong-headed state of mind of her family any member will pay much heed to it.

In five minutes more, Jim, with Cecilia's note in his pocket, is being borne rapidly in a fiacre through the sweet, gay streets. But, drive as rapidly as he may, he is not quick enough to intercept the popular English doctor, who, although, as his servant tantalizingly informs Jim, he is almost always at home at that hour, has, on this occasion, been sent for to an urgent case of sudden illness out of Florence, at the village of Peretola. Jim has to content himself with the assurance that immediately on his return the note will be given him; and with this unsatisfactory intelligence Mr. Burgoyne reappears at the Anglo-Américain. He finds the three persons whom he had left much as he had quitted them—uneasy, cross, and unemployed.

"It is all the fault of that odious expedition yesterday," says Cecilia, harking back to her old cry. "Why we set out at all, I can't imagine; on such a day, it was madness, and——"

"It is not much use thinking of that now," interrupts Burgoyne impatiently, and wincing at these philippics against his poor bride's miserable treat as if they had been directed against herself.

"Well, it is an ill-wind that blows nobody any good," pursues the young lady. "I suppose that two of us enjoyed it enough to make up for the wretchedness of the other four."

Her large prominent eyes are fixed upon Jim as she speaks with a sort of knowingness overlying their former lugubrious expression.

"Do you mean Mr. Byng and Miss Le Marchant?" inquires he, pronouncing both names with a laboured distinctness, while his voice sounds to himself loud and wooden. "You are perfectly right in your conjecture; no doubt they enjoyed themselves. Byng wished me to tell you that they are engaged to be married."

If the essence of a good piece of news is to surprise, Jim can certainly not flatter himself that his comes under that head.

"It did not require a conjurer to prophesy that," is Cecilia's comment. "I never saw two people who troubled themselves less to disguise their feelings. I saw that they neither of them knew whether they were on their heads or on their heels, when they emerged dripping from that horrid pine wood. Dear me!"—with a good-sized sigh—"how smoothly things run for some people! how easily some of these affairs come off, without a hitch anywhere from beginning to end!"

She pauses, and it is plain to those acquainted with her heart history that her thoughts are coursing mournfully back to the all-along reluctant and ultimately entirely faithless clergyman who had last possessed her young affections.

"Without a hitch from beginning to end?" cries Jim hotly, jarred more than he would like to own to himself by this phrase. "How can you possibly tell? These are early days to assert that so dogmatically.

"'There's many a slip'Twixt the cup and the lip.'"

"Do you mean to say that you think it will not come off?" asks Cecilia, a slightly pleasurable light coming into her eyes as she asks—not that she has any ill-will towards Elizabeth, nor any distinct design of her own upon Byng; but that there is something not absolutely disagreeable to her in the idea of his being still among the ranks of the possible.

"I am sure he would make a delightful husband," puts in Sybilla, her praise given emphasis by her desire to employ it as a weapon of offence against one who is at present more deeply than usual in her black books; "he has such gentle, feminine ways; he comes into a room so quietly, and when he asks one how one is really listens for the answer."

"Perhaps you are right, and it will fall through," says Cecilia thoughtfully; "many engagements do!" (sighing again). "She is a sweet, pretty creature, and looks as if butter would not melt in her mouth; but she is evidently older than he."

"Jim will not allow that to be an objection," cries Sybilla, with a faint laugh, "will you, Jim? How much older than you is Amelia? I always forget."

"I never can help thinking that she has a history," resumes Cecilia, in a meditative voice, "and that Mr. Greenock knows it. If ever her name is mentioned he always begins to look wise, as if there were something that he was longing to tell one about her; it is continually on the tip of his tongue—some day it will tumble over the tip."

"I do not think that there is any use in my staying all this while!" cries Jim, jumping up. "Dr. Coldstream cannot be here at soonest for another hour; and I do not think that we are, any of us, very good company for each other to-day, so I will look in again later."

He is out of the room and out of the hotel before his companions can take exception to his disappearance. For some time he walks along aimlessly, his mind a jumble of misery, and dull, remorseful anxiety about Amelia; intolerable comparisons between his own lot and his friend's; sharp knives of jealousy as often as—which is almost unintermittently—his imagination wings its cruel way to the Piazza d'Azeglio—through one opulent week,hisPiazza. At this moment—this moment, while his own leaden feet are treading goalless the hot flags that for him lead nowhere—Byng is enthroned withherin the heaven of the mean littlesalon. He unconsciously shows his teeth in a stern smile to the surprised passers-by. He had jeered Byng for his hyperboles, and now he isout-hyperbolinghim. What a detestable verb he has invented! He laughs out loud. Are they sitting at the window, looking out at the judas tree and the Paulownia? Not they! The window is commanded to a certain extent by the roadway. The window is for acquaintances, banal acquaintances, like himself—no place for the permitted freedoms of exquisite new love. Are they then on the sofa, the vulgar walnut sofa, over which Elizabeth has thrown her blue Neapolitan tablecloth? It is a little sofa, scarcely room for two upon it, but, oh! plenty of room for them! Or are they at the piano? Is she singing him some sugared ditty "lovely well" until he breaks into her song with the storm of his kisses, and her little white hands drop from the keys, and they lie sobbing with ecstasy in each other's arms? It is quite certain that Byng will sob. He is always delighted at having an opportunity for turning on the water-works. Is there a bare possibility that Mrs. Le Marchant may carry her disapprobation to the pitch of impeding by her presence theirtête-à-tête? The idea gives him a momentary alleviation. Why should not he go and see for himself whether it is so? It will be a method of passing the tedious interval before he can hear the doctor's verdict on Amelia. He must at some time or other comply with Byng's pressing prayer to him to offer his congratulations to Elizabeth, and he may as well have a day of complete and perfect pain—pain of various flavours and essences mixed into one consummate draught—a day of which not one hour shall be without its ache.

Having come to this conclusion, his aimless walk quickens, and changes into a purposeful striding through streets and Piazzas, till he finds himself standing at the door of 12a. He looks up at theentresolwindows—they are all open, but no one is either sitting in or looking out at them. It is as he had thought. The window is too public for them; neither can they be at the piano, for not a sound of either voice or instrument is wafted down to him. He runs up the stone stairs, and rings the electric bell. The standing before the unopened portal, and the trembling jar of the bell, bring back to him, with a vividness he could do without, those other long-ago days—they seem to him long ago—when he stood there last, with no easy heart even then, but yet with how different anticipations. He has found it hard enough to bear the brunt of Byng's furious inhuman joy when alone with him. How will he stand it when he sees them together?

He is recalled from these reflections by the opening of the door, and the appearance in it of the ministering angel who has usually admitted him into his Eden—Annunziata. It strikes him that Annunziata looks older and more dishevelled than ever, and is without that benevolent smile of welcoming radiance which her hard-featured face generally wears. Nor does she, as has been her wont, stand back to let him pass in almost before he has put his question, as if she could not admit him quickly enough. But to-day she stands, on the contrary, in the doorway without a smile. In a second the idea flashes across Jim's mind that Byng has forbidden anyone to be let in. It turns him half sick for the moment, and it is with an unsteady voice that he stammers:

"The Signora? The Signorina?"

Annunziata lifts her shoulders in a dismal shrug, and stretches out her hands:

"Gone!"

"Gone?You mean gone out driving?" Then remembering that her English is as minus a quantity as his Italian, he adds in eager explanation, "En fiacre?"

She shakes her head, and then nods vaguely in the direction of the whole of the rest of the world—the whole, that is, that is not 12 bis.

"No,gone!"

"Butwhere?Dove?" cries he, frantic with irritation at his own powerlessness either to understand or be understood.

Again she shakes her head.

"I do not know; they did not say."

He gathers this to be her meaning, and hurriedly puts another query.

"When?Quando?"

But her answer being longer and more voluble, he can't take in its drift, seeing which she retreats a step, and, motioning him with her hand to enter, points down the passage. He does not require to have the dumb-show of invitation twice repeated, but, rushing past her, hurries down the well-known little corridor to thesalondoor. It is open, and he stands within. At the first glance it seems to him to wear much its usual air. There is even a score of music standing on the piano, the copper pots are full of rose-branches, and thescaldinibrimming with Firenze's own lilies, the bit of red Venetian brocade, with the little old tinsel fringe, still hangs over the arm-chair by the fireplace, and the blue Neapolitan table-cover still disguises the vulgarity of the sofa. He has misunderstood Annunziata—it is really monstrous to be so helplessly ignorant of the language of the country you are living in—or she has lost her wits, or——He had thought the room empty, but as he advances a step further into it, he discovers that he is not the sole occupant: that lying stretched upon the floor, with his fair head buried in a little pillow, against which both men have often seen Elizabeth's small white cheek resting, is Byng!—the Byng whose riotous, insolent happiness he had doubted his own powers of witnessing without murdering him!—the splendid felicity of whose lot he has been so bitterly laying beside his own destiny—the Byng whom he had been gnashing his teeth at the thought of—at the thought of him lying in Elizabeth's arms!

"Cressid, I love thee in so strained a purity,That the blest gods—as angry at my fancy,More bright in zeal than the devotion whichCold lips blow to their deities—take thee from me."

"What does this mean?"

The question has to be twice repeated before the person to whom it is addressed gives any sign of having heard it. His ears must be so deeply embedded in the pillow that the passage to his hearing is blocked. It is not till the interrogation is put a second time, in a louder key, and accompanied by a not very gentle shake of the shoulder, that he at length looks up, and reveals what Jim knows to be, and yet has some difficulty in recognising, as the features of Byng—features so altered, so distorted, so swollen by excessive weeping, that no one less intimately acquainted with them than the person who has been already contemplating them, under the influence of a variety of circumstances for a couple of months, could possibly put the owner's name to them. Jim has expected that his young friend would spend some portion of this day in crying, knowing well both his powers of, and his taste for, "turning on the water-works," as he but lately cruelly and uncivilly phrased it to his own mind. But the warm tears of emotion, few and undisfiguring, with which he had credited him, have not much kinship with the scalding torrents that have made his handsome young eyes mere red blurs on his ashen face, that have furrowed his cheeks, and damped his disordered curls, and taken all the starch out of his immaculate "masher" collar. They have wetted, too, into a state of almost pulp, a crumpled sheet of note-paper, which his head seems to have been burrowing in, upon the pillow.

"What does it mean?" repeats Burgoyne, for the third time, a hideous fear assailing him, at the sight of the young man's anguish, that he himself may have mistaken Annunziata's meaning; that her "gone" may have stood for the final one; that some instant stroke may have snatched lovely Elizabeth away, out of the world. Surely no catastrophe less than death can account for such a metamorphosis as that wrought in Byng. "Why do you look like that?" he goes on, his voice taking that accent of rage which extreme fear sometimes gives. "Why do not you speak?"

The other, thus adjured, plainly makes a violent effort for articulation; but his dry throat will let pass nothing but a senseless sob.

"What does that paper mean?" goes on Burgoyne, realizing the impotence of his friend to obey his behest, and rendered doubly terrified by it; "what is it? what does it say? Does it—does it—explain anything?"

He points as he speaks to the blurred and rumpledbillet, and Byng catches it up convulsively, and thrusts it into his hand.

"It is the first letter I ever had from her," he says, the words rushing out broken and scarcely intelligible upon a storm of sobs, and so flings his head violently down upon the floor again in a new access of furious weeping.

Burgoyne holds the paper in his fingers, but for a moment or two he is unable to read it. There is an ugly swimming before his eyes for one thing; for another, Byng's treatment has not improved it as a specimen of caligraphy; but it never in its best days could have been a very legible document. And yet it is not long. Its few words, when at length he makes them out, ran thus:

"Good-bye, I was mad yesterday. I shall never marry you; I have no right to marry anyone. For God's sake do not ask me what I mean; and oh! don't, don't, DON'T come after me!"

There is neither date nor signature. As Jim stands staring at the five crooked, straggling sentences, a great swelling compassion fills his heart. Did ever poor little scribble make it so easy to construct the small shaking hand, and the tender breaking heart that penned it? An immense pity fills his soul; yet does it quite fill it? Is there room besides, in one corner, for a small pinch of devilish joy?

"There's many a slip'Twixt the cup and the lip."

His own words of ill-natured croaking, uttered not an hour ago, to Cecilia Wilson, recur to his mind. How little he thought that that prophecy would so soon be fulfilled! He remains so long motionless and silent, his fingers still holding the paper, whose contents he has long ago mastered, that Byng—the violence of his paroxysm of grief at length exhausted—struggles to his feet and speaks—speaks as well as the catch in his sobbing breath and his quivering lips will let him.

"It is not her doing! You may think it is her doing, but I know it is not! I know her better than you do."

"I never made any pretensions to knowing her well," replies the other sadly, and relinquishing as he speaks the note to its owner.

"Is it likely, I ask you?" cries Byng excitedly. "I put it to you fairly: is it likely that she, with her seraph nature, all love and burning, she that is tender over drowning flies, would have put me to this horrible pain?—O God, you do not know what pain it is" ["Do not I?" aside]—"of her own free will?"

"I do not know; as you say, I do not know her well."

"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'"

says Byng, beginning to walk up and down the room with the tears still rolling down his cheeks, but in his spouting voice—a voice which at once assures Jim of an amelioration in his friend's condition, and hardens his heart against him. As a broad rule, indeed, it may be laid down that that sorrow which courses through one of the numberless channels cut by the poets for it will not bring its owner to Waterloo Bridge.

"But what am I saying?" lapsing out of his quotation into broken-hearted prose again. "It was not she! If I thought it were she, could I live a moment? It is her mother; no sane person can doubt that it is her mother's doing! She was always so sweetly docile, and her mother has conceived some prejudice against me. Did not I tell you how barbarously she shut the door upon me last night?—shut the door of my heaven in my face just as I thought I had won the right to enter it. Who would not have thought that it was won who had seen us together in the wood?"

Jim writhes.

"Oh, never mind the wood now!"

"Someone has prejudiced her against me, but who? I did not know that I had an enemy in the world. Someone has told her about—about Oxford—about my being sent down."

Jim is silent.

"If it is only that——" a tearful buoyancy beginning to pierce through his despair.

"It is not that."

"Someone has put a spoke in my wheel; but who? You are the only person who could, and you, dear old chap, are the last person who would, though you were not very encouraging to me last night!Youdid not?"

There is so direct an interrogation in the last words, accompanied by so confiding a look of affection, that yet has an uneasy touch of doubt in it, that Jim is obliged to answer.

"No, I did not put a spoke in your wheel; but"—his honesty forcing the admission—"I am not at all so sure that I am the last person who would have done so, if I could."

Byng has wiped his eyes to clear his vision of the blinding tears, and has again directed them to the note, which he has all this while been alternately pressing against his heart, laying upon his forehead, and crushing against his mouth.

"It seems blasphemy to say so of anything that came from her hand," he says, poring for the hundredth time over each obscure word, "but it reads like nonsense, does it not? 'I shall never marry you! I have no right to marry anyone!' No right? what does she mean?"

Jim shakes his head sadly.

"How can I tell?"

"Do you think it is possible"—lifting his disfigured eyes in horrified appeal to his friend—"it is a dreadful hypothesis, but I can think of no other—that that bright intelligence was clouded—that—that her dear little wits were touched when she wrote this?"

"No, I do not think so."

"You—you are not keeping anything from me?"—coming a step nearer, and convulsively clutching his friend's arm—"you—you do not know anything—anything that could throw light upon—upon this? I do not know whether you are conscious of it, but there is something in your manner that might lead me to that conclusion. Do you know—have you heard anything?"

"I know nothing," replies Jim slowly, and looking uncomfortably away from the questioner, "but I conjecture, I fear, I believe that—that——"

"That what? For God's sake, be a little quicker!"

"That—that—there is a—a—something in her past."

Byng falls back a pace or two, and puts up his hand to his head.

"What—what do you mean? What are you talking about? Her past? What"—soaring into extravagance again—"what can there be written on that white page?—so white that it bedazzles the eyes of even the angels who read it."

"I do not know what there is," replies Jim miserably, irritated almost beyond endurance by this poetic flight, and rendered even more wretched than he was before by therôlethat seems to be forced upon him, of conjecturally blackening Elizabeth's character. "How many times must I tell you that Iknowno more than you, only from—from various indications I have been led to believe that she hassomething—some great sorrow behind her?"

There is a silence, and when it is broken it is infringed by what is not much more than a whisper.

"What—what do you mean; what—what sort of a sorrow?"

"I tell you, I do not know."

Byng's tears have stopped flowing, and he now lifts his eyes, full of a madness of exaltation, to the ceiling.

"I will go to her," he cries; "if sorrow has the audacity to approach her again, it will have to reckon with me. There is no sorrow, none, in the whole long gamut of woe, for which love such as mine is not a balm. Reciprocal love!"—trailing the words in a sort of slow rapture—"no one that had seen her in the wood could have doubted that itwasreciprocal."

"No doubt, no doubt."

"I will go to her!"—clasping his hands high in the air—"I will pour the oil and spikenard of my adoration into her gaping wounds! I will kiss the rifts together, though they yawn as wide as hell—yes, I will."

"For heaven's sake, do not talk such dreadful gibberish," breaks in Jim, at length at the end of his patience, which had run quite to the extreme of its tether indeed at the last mention of that ever-recurring wood. "Itisa knockdown blow for you, I own, and I would do what I could to help you; but if you will keep on spouting and talking such terrible bosh——"

"I suppose I am making an ass of myself," replies Byng, thus brought down with a run from his heroics. "I beg your pardon, I am sure, old man. I have no right to victimize you," his sweet nature asserting itself even at this bitter moment; "but you see it is so horribly sudden. If you had seen her when I parted from her last night at the door! She lingered a moment behind Mrs. Le Marchant—just a moment, just time enough to give me one look, one wordless look. She did not speak; she was so divinely dutiful and submissive that nothing would have persuaded her by the lightest word to imply any censure of her mother; but she gave me just a look, which said plainly, 'It is notmyfault that you are turned away!Iwould have welcomed you in!' Upon that look I banqueted in heaven all night."

He stops, choked.

"Well?"

"And then this morning, when I got here—I think I ran all the way; I am sure I did, for I saw people staring at me as I passed—to be met by Annunziata with the news that they weregone! I did not believe her; I laughed in her face, and then she grew angry, and bid me come in and see for myself! And I rushed past her, in here, with my arms stretched out, confident that in one short moment moreshewould be filling them, and instead of her"—dropping upon his knees by the table with a groan—"I find this!"—dashing the note upon the floor—"all that she leaves me to fill my embrace instead of her is this poor little pillow, that still seems to keep a faint trace of the perfume of her delicate head!"

He buries his own in it again as he speaks, beginning afresh to sob loudly.

Jim stands beside him, his mind half full of compassion and half of a burning exasperation, and his body wholly rigid.

"When did they go? at what hour? last night or this morning?"

"This morning early, quite early."

"They have left all their things behind them"—looking round at the room, strewn with the traces of recent and refined occupation.

"Yes"—lifting his wet face out of his cushion—"and at first, seeing everything just as usual, even to her very workbasket—she has left her very workbasket behind—I was quite reassured. I felt certain that they could have gone for only a few hours—for the day perhaps; but——"

He breaks off

"Yes?"

"They left word that their things were to be packed and sent after them to an address they would give."

"And you do not know where they have gone?"

"I know nothing, nothing, only that they are gone.

"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'

Oh! oh!! oh!!!"

"You never heard them speak of their plans, mention any place they intended to move to on leaving Florence?"

"Never!"

"It is too late for Rome," says Jim musingly; "England? I hardly think England," recalling Elizabeth's forlorn admission made to him at Monte Senario, "Why should we go home? We have nothing pleasant to go to."

"I do not think they had any plans," says Byng, speaking in a voice which is thick with much weeping; "they never seemed to me to have any. She was so happy here, so gay, there never was anything more lovely than her gaiety, except—except—her tenderness."

"Yes, yes, no doubt. Then you are absolutely without a clue?"

"Absolutely."

"Do you mean to say that up to yesterday—all through yesterday, even—she never gave you a hint of any intention of leaving Florence?"

"Never,never. On the contrary, in the——" (he is going to say "the wood," but thinks better of it), "we were planning many more such expeditions as yesterday's. At least, I was planning them."

"And she assented?"

"She did notdissent. She met me with a look of divine acquiescence."

Jim turns away his head. He is involuntarily picturing to himself what that look was like, and with what sweet dumb-show it was accompanied.

"What powers of hell"—banging his head down upon the table again—"could have wrought such a hideous change in so few hours? Only ten! for it was eight in the evening before I left them, and they were off at six this morning. They could have seen no one; they had received no letters, no telegrams, for I inquired of Annunziata, and she assured me that they had not. Oh no!"—lifting his face with a gleam of moist hope upon it—"there is only one tenable hypothesis about it—it is notherdoing at all. She wrote this under pressure. It is her handwriting, is it not?—though I would not swear even to that. I—I have played the mischief with my eyes"—pulling out his drenched pocket-handkerchief, and hastily wiping them—"so that I cannot see properly; but itishers, is not it?"

"I do not know; I never saw her handwriting; she never wrote to me."

"It was evidently dictated to her," cries Byng, his sanguine nature taking an upward spring again; "there are clear traces, even in the very way the letters are formed, of its being written to order reluctantly. She did it under protest. See how her poor little hand was shaking, and she was crying all the while, bless her! There, do not you see a blister on the paper—here on this side?"

Burgoyne does not see any blister, but as he thinks it extremely probable that there was one, he does not think himself called upon to wound his friend by saying so.

"I declare I think we have got hold of the right clue at last," cries Byng, his dimmed eyes emitting such a flash as would have seemed impossible to them five minutes ago. "Read in this light, it is not nearly so incomprehensible: 'I shall never marry you, I have no right to marry anyone.' Of course, I see now! What an ass I was not to see it at once! What she means is that she has no right to leave her mother! To anyone who knew her lofty sense of duty as well as I ought to have done it is quite obvious that that is what she means. Is not it quite obvious? is not it as clear as the sun in heaven?"

Jim shakes his head.

"I am afraid that it is rather a forced interpretation."

"I do not agree with you," rejoins the other hotly; "I see nothing forced about it. You do not know as well as I do—how should you?—her power of delicate, self-sacrificing devotion. It is overstrained, I grant you; but there it is—she thinks she has no right to leave her mother now that she is all alone."

"She is not alone; she has her husband."

"I mean now that all her other children are married and scattered. There are plenty more—are not there?—though I never could get her to talk about them."

"There are two sisters and two brothers."

"But they are no longer any good to their mother," persists Byng, clinging to his theory with all the greater tenacity as he sees that it meets with no very great acceptance in his friend's eyes; "as far as she is concerned they are non-existent."

"I do not know what right you have to say that."

"And so she, with her lofty idea of self-sacrifice, immolates her own happiness on the altar of her filial affection. It is just like her!"—going off into a sort of rapture—"blind mole that I was not to divine the motive, which her ineffable delicacy forbade her to put into words. She thought she had a right to think that I should have comprehended her without words!"

He has talked himself into a condition of such exalted confidence before he reaches the end of this sentence that Jim is conscious of a certain brutality in applying to him the douche contained in his next words.

"I do not know why you should credit Mrs. Le Marchant with such colossal selfishness; she never used to be a selfish woman."

But Burgoyne's cold shower-bath does not appear even to damp the shoulders for which it is intended.

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