"There are no more by-path meadows where you may innocently
linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the
grave. You may think you had a conscience and believed in God;
but what is conscience to a wife?.... To marry is to
domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is
nothing left for you--not even suicide--but to be good."
There is no particular reason why Burgoyne should not impart to his
companion what he knows--after all it is not very much--about their two
countrywomen. Upon reflection he had told himself this, and conquered a
reluctance, that he cannot account for, to mentioning their name; and to
relating the story of those shadowy idyllic two months of his life,
which form all of it that has ever come into contact with theirs. So
that by the time--some thirty-six hours later--when they reach Florence,
the younger man is in possession of as much information about the
objects of their common interest as it is in the power of the elder one
to impart.
To neither of them, meanwhile, is any second glimpse vouchsafed of those
objects, eagerly--though with different degrees of overtness in that
eagerness--as they both look out for them among the luggage-piles and
the tweed-clad English ladies at the station. It had been the intention
of Burgoyne that he and his friend should put up at the same hotel as
that inhabited by his betrothed and her family; hut, finding that it is
full, he orders rooms at the Minerva, and in the fallen dusk of a rather
chill spring night, finds himself traversing the short distance from the
railway to that hotel.
As he and Byng sit over their coffee after dinner in the _salle a
manger_, almost its only tenants at that late hour, the younger man
remarks matter-of-factly, as if stating a proposition almost too obvious
to be worth uttering--
"I suppose you are off to the Anglo-Americain now."
"I think not," replies Jim slowly; "it is past ten, you see, and they
are early people." He adds a moment later, as if suspecting his own
excuse of insufficiency, "Mr. Wilson is rather an invalid, and there is
also an invalid or semi-invalid sister; I think that I had better not
disturb them to-night."
Byng has never been engaged to be married, except in theory, and it is
certainly no business of his to blow his friend's flagging ardour into
flame, so he contents himself with an acquiescent observation to the
effect that the train must have been late. But at all events the next
morning finds Burgoyne paying his fiacre at the door of the
Anglo-Americain, with the confidence of a person who is certain of
finding those he seeks, a confidence justified by the result; for,
having followed a waiter across a courtyard, and heard him knock at a
door on the ground-floor, that door opens with an instantaneousness
which gives the idea of an ear having been pricked to catch the expected
rap, and the next moment, the intervening _garcon_ having withdrawn, Jim
stands face to face with his Amelia. Her features are all alight with
pleasure, but her first words are not particularly amorous.
"Would you mind coming into the dining-room? Sybilla is in the
drawing-room already this morning. She said she was afraid it was going
to be one of her bad days, so I thought" (rather regretfully) "that
possibly she would be a little later than usual in coming down; but, on
the contrary, she is much earlier."
It is possible that an extremely ardent love may be independent of
surroundings; may burn with as fierce a flame, when its owner or victim
is seated on a hard horsehair chair beside a dining-room table, in a
little dull hotel back room, as when the senses are courted by
softly-cushioned lounges, penetrating flower-scents, and cunningly
arranged _bric-a-brac_; but perhaps Jim's passion is not of this intense
and Spartan quality. At all events a chill steals over him as Amelia
leads the way into that small and uncheerful chamber where the Wilson
family daily banquet. He is not so lost to all sense of what England and
Amelia expect of him as not to take her in his arms and kiss her very
kindly and warmly, before they sit down on two hard chairs side by side;
and even when they have done so, he still holds her hand, and kisses it
now and then. He has a great many things to say to her, but "out of the
abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh" is not invariably true.
Sometimes that very abundance clogs the utterance, and, after a ten
months' separation, the hinges of even lovers' tongues are apt at first
to be somewhat rusty.
"And are you really glad to see me again?" asks the woman--she is
scarcely a girl, having the doubtful advantage of being her betrothed's
senior by two years. The horsehair chairs are obviously powerless to
take the edge off her bliss; and she can scarcely command her voice as
she asks the question.
"I decline to answer all such futile inquiries," replies he, smiling not
unkindly; but there is no tremor in his voice. "Even if I did not
discourage them on principle, I should have no time to answer them
to-day; I have so much to say to you that I do not know where to begin."
"After ten months that is not very surprising," rejoins she, with a
stifled sigh. There is no sentimental reproach in her words or tone; but
in both lurks a note of wistfulness which gives his conscience a prick.
"Of course not! of course not!" he rejoins hastily; "but it is not
really ten months--no, surely----"
"Ten months, one week, two days, four hours and a half!"
Against such exactitude of memory what appeal has he? He attempts none,
and only thinks with a faint unjust irritation that she might have
spared him the odd hours.
"And how are things going? How are you all getting on?" he asks,
precipitating himself upon a fresh subject, since he feels prevented by
circumstances from saying anything likely to bring him much distinction
upon the old one. "Your father?"
"His throat is better"--with an accent of hesitating filial piety, as if
there were something else about him that was not better.
"And Sybilla?"
"Oh, poor Sybilla! she has her bad days now and then."
"And, like the early Christians, she resolves to have all things in
common. I expect that her family have their bad days too," says Jim
dryly.
"Well, we do sometimes," replies Amelia with reluctant admission; "but
she really does try to control herself, poor thing; she is hardly ever
unbearable now."
"And Cecilia?"
"She is rather in trouble just now; I fear there is no doubt that the
man she was engaged to has thrown her over. You never saw him? Oh no! Of
course, the affair came on after you left England."
Burgoyne's eyebrows have gone up, and his face has assumed an expression
less of surprise than admiration at this piece of news.
"How many does that make? Four? Well, courage! There is luck in odd
numbers; perhaps she will land the fifth."
"She will tell you about it herself," says Amelia; "she tells everybody;
she likes talking about it--it is very odd, but she does. When you throw
me over"--rubbing his hand which she holds, with shy and deprecating
caressingness, against her own cheek--"I shall tell nobody; I shall keep
my misfortune very dark."
"When I do!" repeats he with laughing emphasis; but to his own ear both
the emphasis and the laughter sound flat. This is perhaps the cause why
he, a second time, runs away from his subject; or, more probably, he is
really in haste to get to the new one. "Meanwhile," he says, his eyes
involuntarily dropping to the carpet, as if he had rather not see the
effect of his words upon her; "meanwhile, someone has thrown me over."
"You?"
"Yes, me; I did not write it to you, because I do not see much use in
putting down bad news in black and white, and even with this little
delay, I am afraid," with a dry smile, "that you will have plenty of
time to enjoy it."
He pauses for an instant, and she does not hurry him with any teasing
questions; but waits, with meek patience, till he feels inclined to go
on.
"My aunt is going to be married."
If he has wished that his news shall produce the effect of a torpedo, he
has no cause to complain of his want of success. His placid Amelia
vaults to her feet.
"Married!" she repeats with a gasp. "Why, she is quite, quite old!"
"She is sixty-five!"
The colour has flooded all Amelia's face; the blazing colour that means
not pleasure, but consternation. It is some moments before she can frame
her next query.
"And is he?--do you?--has she chosen wisely, I mean?"
Jim laughs again.
"Can one choose wisely at sixty-five? Well, whether she has or no is a
matter of opinion; she has chosen the curate of the parish, who, by
reason of his extreme juvenility, is still in deacon's orders."
Miss Wilson's limbs are shaking so that she cannot maintain her standing
attitude. She sinks down by the dining-table again in her hard chair. It
is a very hard chair on which to receive such ill news.
"And cannot you hinder it, cannot you dissuade her?" she asks
falteringly.
"I shall not try; poor old woman! After all, she has a right to pursue
her own happiness in her own way, only I wish that she had made up her
mind twenty years ago; though, to be sure, how could she?"--with another
smile--"since, at that time, her bridegroom was not much more than
born."
A dead silence supervenes--a silence of shocked stupefaction on the one
side, of rather dismal brooding on the other. At length Amelia nerves
herself to put a question upon which it seems to her, not very
incorrectly, that her whole future hangs. She does it in such a low
voice that none but very sharp ears could have caught it. Jim's ears are
so; practised as they are in listening for the stealthy tread of wild
animals, and for the indescribable sounds of mountain solitudes at
night.
"Will it--will it--make a great difference to you?"
Burgoyne lifts his eyes, which have been idly bent on the floor, and
looks straight and full at her across the corner of the table.
"It will make all the difference!" he answers slowly.
Poor Amelia is holding her handkerchief in her hand. She lifts it to her
mouth and bites a corner of it to hide the quivering of her lips and
chin. She does not wish to add to his pain by any breakdown on her own
part. But Jim divines the quivering even under the morsel of cambric,
and looks away again.
"Her money is almost entirely in her own power," he continues, in an
unemotional voice; "and when she announced her marriage to me, she also
announced her intention of settling the whole of it upon her--her"--he
pauses a second, as if resolved to keep out of his voice the accent of
satire and bitterness that pierces through its calm--"her husband."
Amelia has dropped both shielding hand and handkerchief into her lap.
She has forgotten her effort to conceal the blankness of her dismay.
Unless she conceals the whole of her face, indeed, the attempt would be
in vain, since each feature speaks it equally.
"Her whole fortune?" she repeats, almost inaudibly. "_All?_"
"What, all my pretty chickens and their dam?"
says Jim, oppressed by her overwhelmed look into an artificial and
dreary levity, and in not particularly apt quotation. "My dear, do not
look so broken-hearted. I am not absolutely destitute; I need not become
a sandwich man. I have still got my L800 a year, my very own, which
neither man nor mouse, neither curate nor vicar, can take from me. I can
still go on rioting upon that; the question is"--his words coming more
slowly, and his tone growing graver--"have I any right to ask you to
riot on it too?"
Her hand has gone in feverish haste out to his for answer, and her eyes,
into which the tears are welling, look with an intense dumb wistfulness
into his; but, for the moment, it remains dumb. There is something
painful to Burgoyne in that wistfulness, almost more painful than the
telling of that news which has produced it. He looks down upon the
tablecloth, and, with his disengaged hand, the one not imprisoned in his
betrothed's fond hold, draws patterns with a paper-knife accidentally
left there.
"The one thing that I blame her for," he continues, not following up the
branch of the subject that his last speech had begun to open up, and
speaking with a composure which, to the stricken Amelia, appears to
evidence his attainment of the highest pinnacle of manly fortitude, "the
only thing I blame her for, is her having hindered my adopting any
profession. Poor old woman, it was not malice prepense, I know; she had
not seen her Jessamey then, probably had not even a prophetic instinct
of him, but as things turned out"--stifling a sigh--"it would have been
kinder to have put me in the way of earning my own living."
Amelia's head has sunk down upon his hand--he feels her hot tears upon
it; but now that the theme has no longer reference to herself, she can
speak. She straightens herself, and there is a flash, such as he has
very seldom seen there, in her rather colourless orbs.
"It was monstrous of her!" she cries, with the almost exaggerated
passion of a usually very self-controlled person. "After having always
told you that you were to be her heir!"
"But _had_ she told me so?" replies Jim, passing his hand with a
perplexed air over his own face. "That is what I have been trying to
recall for the last few days. I never remember the time when I did not
believe it, so I suppose that someone must have told me so; but I could
not swear that she herself had ever put it down in black and white.
However," tossing his head back with a gesture as of one who throws off
his shoulders a useless burden, "what does that matter now? I am not her
heir, I am nobody's heir; we must look facts in the face! Amelia,
dear"--in a tone of reluctant tender affection, as of one compelled, yet
most unwilling, to give a little child, or some other soft, helpless
creature, pain--"we must look facts in the face!" There is something in
his voice that makes Amelia's heart stand still; but she attempts no
interruption.
"It is very hard for me, dear, after all these"--he pauses a second; he
is about to say "weary years' waiting," but his conscience arrests him;
to him they have not been weary, so, after a hardly-perceptible break,
he goes on--"after all these many years' waiting, to have come to this,
is not it?"
He had not calculated on the effect which would be produced by his
melancholy words and his caressing tone. She buries her face on his
shoulder, sobbing uncontrollably.
"They were not long!" she murmurs brokenly. "Nothing is, nothing can be,
long to me as long as I have you, or the hope of you!"