In a ripe civilization such as ours there are formulas provided to meet
the requirements of every exigency that may possibly arise; but amongst
them there is not one which teaches us how to greet a person come back
from the dead, because it is held impossible that such a contingency can
occur. Perhaps this is the reason why Jim Burgoyne, usually a docile and
obedient member of the society to which he belongs, now flies in the
face of all the precepts instilled into him by that society's code. At
the sight of Elizabeth Le Marchant entering the room, clad in a very
neat tailor gown, instead of the winding-sheet with which he had
credited her, he at first stands transfixed, staring at her with a
hardness of intensity which is allowed to us in the case of Titian's
"Bella," or Botticelli's "Spring," but has never been accounted
permissible in the case of a more living loveliness. Then, before he can
control, or even question the impulse that drives him, it has carried
him to her.
"Elizabeth!" he says, in that sort of awed semi-whisper with which one
would salute a being plainly returned from the other side, fearing that
the fulness of a living voice might strike too strongly on his disused
ear--"is it really Elizabeth?"
Had Burgoyne been quite sure, even now, of that fact; if he had had his
wits well about him, he would certainly not have addressed her by her
Christian name. But from the dead the small pomps and ceremonies of
earth fall off. We think of them by their naked names--must we not then
appeal to them by the same when they reappear before us?
The girl--for she does not look much more--thus rudely and startlingly
bombarded, drops her Baedeker out of her slim-gloved hand, and with a
positive jump at the suddenness of the address, looks back
apprehensively at her interlocutor. In her eyes is, at first, only the
coldly frightened expression of one discourteously assailed by an
insolent stranger; but in a space of time as short as had served him to
note the same metamorphosis in the case of her parents, he sees the look
of half--three-quarter--whole recognition dawn in her eyes,
followed--alas! there can be no mistake about it--by the same aspiration
after flight. There is no reason why she should not recognise him again
at once. He has fallen a prey neither to hair nor fat--the two main
disguisers and disfigurers of humanity. His face is as smooth and his
figure as spare as when, ten years ago, he had given the pretty tomboy
of sixteen lessons in jumping the ha-ha. And as to her identity, no
shadow of doubt any longer lingers in his mind.
The violence and shock of his attack have made her crimson, have matched
her cheeks with those long-withered damasks in the Moat garden, with
which they used to vie in bloomy vividness. But even yet he does not
treat her quite as if she were really and veritably living; he has not
yet got back his conventional manners.
"I thought you were dead," he says, his voice not even yet raised to its
ordinary key, some vague awe still subduing it.
It must be a trick of his excited imagination that makes it seem to him
as if she said under her breath, "So I am!"
But before he has had time to do more than distrust the testimony of his
ears, Mrs. Le Marchant strikes in quickly--
"We cannot help what Mr. Burgoyne thinks," says she, with a constrained
laugh; "but you are not dead, are you, Elizabeth? We are neither of us
dead; on the contrary, we are very much alive. Who can help being alive
in this heavenly place? And you? When did you come? What hotel are you
at? Have you been here long? Do you make a long stay?"
She pours out her questions with such torrent-force and rapidity, as
gives to her auditor the conviction that it is her aim to have a
monopoly of them.
After one look of unbounded astonishment at his companion's onslaught,
Byng has withdrawn to a discreet distance.
"You never mentioned her when I met you in Oxford," says Burgoyne,
disregarding her trivial and conventional questions, and turning his
eyes away with difficulty from his old playfellow.
Mrs. Le Marchant laughs again, still constrainedly.
"Probably you never asked after her."
"I was afraid," he says solemnly; "after ten years one is afraid; and as
you did not mention her--you know you mentioned all the others--I
thought you had lost her!"
A sort of slight shiver passes over the woman's frame.
"No, thank God! No!"
During the foregoing little dialogue about herself, Elizabeth has stood
with her eyes on the ground; but at the end of it she lifts them to
smile lovingly at her mother. They are very pretty eyes still, but
surely they seem to have cried a good deal; and now that the hurrying
blood has left her cheek again, Burgoyne sees that she looks more nearly
her age than he had imagined at the first glance. He has not heard her
voice yet; she has not spoken, unless that first shaken whisper--so much
more likely to be the freak of his own heated fancy--could count for
speech. He must hear her tones. Do they keep an echo of the other world,
as he still imagines that he sees a shade from it lying lingeringly
across her face?
"Do you ever climb apple-trees now?" he asks abruptly. She starts
slightly, and again, though with a weaker red wave, her rather thin
cheeks grow tinged.
"Did I ever climb them?" she says, with a bewildered look, and speaking
in a somewhat tremulous voice. "Yes"--slowly, as if with an effort of
memory--"I believe I did."
"You have forgotten all about it?" cries Jim, in an accent of absurdly
disproportioned disappointment. "Have you forgotten the kangaroo too?
have you forgotten everything?"
Perhaps she is putting her memory to the same strain as he had done his
in the case of her mother's name on the occasion of their Oxford
meeting. At all events, she leaves the question unanswered, and the
elder woman again hurries to her help against this persistent claimant
of reminiscences.
"You must not expect us all to have such memories as you have," she says
with a touch of friendliness in her look.
"I must own that I too had quite forgotten the kangaroo; and so I fear
had Robert, until you reminded us of it in Mesopotamia."
"How is Mr. Le Marchant?" inquires Jim, thus reminded to put his tardy
query--"is he with you?"
"No, he is not very fond of being abroad; it is not"--smiling--"'dear
abroad' to him, but I think that he will very likely come out to
Florence to fetch us."
"You are going to Florence?" cries the young man eagerly. "So am I! oh,
hurrah! then we shall often meet."
But the touch of friendliness, whose advent he had hailed so joyfully,
has vanished out of Mrs. Le Marchant's voice, or, at least, is overlaid
with a species of stiffness, as she answers distantly, "We do not intend
to go out at all in Florence--I mean into society."
"But I am not society," replies he, chilled, yet resolute. "I
wish"--glancing rather wistfully from one to the other--"that I _could_
give you a little of my memory. If I could, you would see that, after
being so infinitely good to me at the Moat, you cannot expect me to meet
you as total strangers now."
In the sense of ill-usage that fills his breast, the fact of how almost
entirely oblivious he had been of the persons before him, during the
greater part of the long interval that had parted them, has--such is
human nature--quite slipped his recollection. It is brought back to him
in some degree with a twinge by Mrs. Le Marchant saying in a relenting
tone, and with an accent of remorse, "And you have remembered us all
these years?"
He cannot, upon reflection, conscientiously say that he has; but is yet
disingenuous enough to allow a speaking silence to imply acquiescence.
"And you are on your way to Florence too?" continues she, mistaking the
cause of his dumbness; the tide of compunction evidently setting more
strongly towards him, in her womanly heart, at the thought of the entire
want of interest she has manifested in the case of one whose long
faithfulness to her and her family had deserved a better treatment.
"Yes."
His face clouds so perceptibly as he pronounces this monosyllable, that
his interlocutor inquires, with a growing kindness:
"Not on any unpleasant errand, I hope?"
He laughs the uneasy laugh of an Anglo-Saxon obliged to tell, or at all
events telling, some intimate detail about himself.
"I am going to see my young woman--the girl I am engaged to."
"Well, that is a pleasant errand, surely?" (smiling).
"_C'est salon!_" replies Jim gloomily. "I have a piece of ill-news to
tell her;" then, with a half-shy effort to escape into generalities,
"which way do you think that ill-news read best--on paper or _viva
voce_?"
She shivers a little.
"I do not know. I do not like them either way."
Then, taking out her watch, with the evident determination to be
surprised at the lateness of the hour, she cries, "It is actually a
quarter to two! Are not you famished, Elizabeth? I am!"
There is such apparent and imminent departure in her eye that Burgoyne
feels that there is no time to be lost.
"Have you decided upon your hotel in Florence?" he asks precipitately.
"We have decided against them all," is her answer. "We have taken a
little apartment--a poor little _entresol_; but it is such a poor little
one, that I should be ashamed to ask any of my friends to come and see
me there."
She accompanies the last words, as if to take the sting out of them,
with as sweet and friendly a smile as any he remembers in the Devonshire
days. But the sting is not taken out, all the same; it lingers, pricking
and burning still, after both the tall, thin, black figure, and the
slim, little gray one have disappeared.
The moment that this is the case, Byng rejoins his friend; a curiosity
and alert interest in his young eyes, which his companion feels no
desire to gratify. He is unable, however, to maintain the entire silence
he had intended upon the subject, since Byng, after waiting for what, to
his impatience, appears a more than decent interval, is constrained to
remark--
"Did I hear you tell that lady, when first you spoke to her, that she
was dead?"
"I thought she was."
"Had you heard it?"
"No."
"Did you see it in the papers?"
"No."
A pause.
"I wonder why you thought she was dead."
The other makes a rather impatient movement.
"I had no reason--none whatever. It was an idiotic inference."
Byng draws a long breath of satisfaction.
"Well, at all events, I am very glad that she is not."
Jim turns upon him with something of the expression of face worn by Mrs.
Sarah Gamp on hearing Mrs. Prig express her belief that it was not by
Mrs. Harris that her services would be required. "Why should you be glad
of that, Betsy? She is unbeknown to you except by hearing. Why should
you be glad?"
As Byng's case is a more aggravated one than Mrs. Prig's, seeing that
Elizabeth Le Marchant is 'unbeknown' to him even by hearing, so is the
warmth, or rather coldness, with which his friend receives his remark
not inferior to that of "Sairey."
"I do not quite see how it affects you. Why are you glad?"
"_Why am I glad?_" replies the younger man, with a lightening eye. "For
the same reason that I am glad that Vandyke painted that
picture"--pointing to it--"or that Shakespeare wrote _As You Like It_.
The world is the richer by them all three."
But to this poetic and flattering analogy, Jim's only answer is a surly
"Humph!"