It is, perhaps, fortunate for Amelia that she cannot see the expression
of the face which looks out above her prostrate head into space, with a
blankness equal to what has been her own, a blankness streaked, as hers
was not, with remorse. He would give anything to be able to answer her
in her own key, to tell her that, as long as he can keep her, the going
or coming of any lesser good hurts him as little as the brushing past
his cheek of a summer moth or windblown feather. But when he tries to
frame a sentence of this kind, his tongue cleaves to the roof of his
mouth. He can only hold her to him in an affectionate clasp, whose
dumbness he hopes that she attributes to silencing emotion. She herself
indulges in no very prolonged manifestation of her passion. In a few
moments she is again sitting up beside him with wiped eyes, none the
handsomer, poor soul, for having cried, and listening with a deep
attention to an exposition of her lover's position and prospects, which
he is at no pains to tinge with a factitious rose colour.
"Have you realized," he says, "that I shall never be better off than I
am now? never! _never!_ For though of course I shall try to get work,
one knows how successful that quest generally is in the case of a man
with no special aptitudes, no technical training, and who starts in the
race handicapped by being ten years too late!"
But the dismalness of this panorama raises no answering gloom in the
young woman's face. She nods her head gently.
"I realize it."
"And this is what I have brought you to, after all these years'
waiting," he continues, in a tone of profound regret. "All I can offer
you at the end of them is a not particularly genteel poverty, not even a
cottage with a double coach-house!"--laughing grimly.
"I do not want a double coach-house, nor even a single one!" replies
Amelia stoutly, and laughing too, a little, through returning tears. "Do
not you know that I had rather drive a costermonger's barrow with you
than go in a coach and six without you!"
This is the highest flight of imagination of which Jim has ever known
his matter-of-fact Amelia guilty, and he can pay her his thanks for it
only in compunctious kisses. Perhaps it is they, perhaps it is the
thought which dictates her next hesitating speech, that bring a light
into Amelia's tear-reddened eyes.
"If you will never be better off----" She stops.
"Yes, dear, go on; 'if I shall never be better off'--I certainly never
shall; I feel sure that you will be able to put my earnings for the next
ten years into your eye, and see none the worse for them!"
"If--you--will--never--be--better--off----" she repeats again, more
slowly, and breaking off at the same place.
"Well, dear?"
"If you will never be better off"--this time she finishes her sentence;
but it is rendered almost inaudible by the fact of her flushed face and
quivering lips being pressed against his breast--"why should we wait any
longer?"
_Why should we wait any longer?_ To most persons, granted the usual
condition of feeling of a betrothed couple, this would seem a very
natural and legitimate deduction from the premises; but, strange to say,
it comes upon Burgoyne with the shock of a surprise. He has been
thinking vaguely of his change of fortune as a cause for unlimited
delay, perhaps for the rupture of his engagement, never as a reason for
its immediate fulfilment.
He gives a sort of breathless gasp, which is happily too low for Amelia
with her still hidden face to hear. To be married at once! To sit down
for all time to Amelia and L800 a year! To forego for ever the thrilling
wandering life; the nights under the northern stars, the stealthy
tracking of shy forest creatures; the scarce coarse delicious food, the
cold, the fatigue, the hourly peril, that, since its probable loss is
ever in sight, make life so sweetly worth having--all, in short, that
goes to make up so many an Englishman's ideal of felicity; that has
certainly hitherto gone to make up Jim's. To renounce it all! There is
no doubt that the bitterness of this thought comes first; but presently,
supplanting it, chasing it away, there follows another, a
self-reproachful light flashing over his past eight years, showing him
his own selfishness colossal and complete for the first time. In a
paroxysm of remorse, he has lifted Amelia's face, and, framing it with
his hands, looks searchingly into it.
"I believe," he says in a shaken voice, "that you would have married me
eight years ago, on my pittance, if I had asked you!"
No "Yes" was ever written in larger print than that which he read in her
patient pale eyes. Even at this instant there darts across him a wish
that they were not quite so pale, but he detests himself for it.
"And I never suspected it!" he cries compunctiously. "I give you my word
of honour, I never suspected it! I thought you looked upon my poverty in
as prohibitory a light as I did myself."
"I do not call it such great poverty," replies Amelia, her practical
mind resuming its habitual sway over her emotions. "Of course, it is an
income that would require a little management; but if we cut our coat
according to our cloth, and did not want to move about too much, we
might live either in a not very fashionable part of London, or in some
cheap district in the country very comfortably."
Despite his remorse, a cold shiver runs down Burgoyne's spine at the
picture that rises, conjured up with too much distinctness by her words,
before his mind's eyes; the picture of a snug Bayswater villa, with a
picturesque parlour-maid, or the alternative cottage in some dreary
Wiltshire or Dorsetshire village, with a shrubbery of three aucuba
bushes, and a kitchen-garden of half an acre. It may be that, her frame
being in such close proximity to his, she feels the influence of his
shiver, and that it suggests her next sentence, which is in a less
sanguine key.
"But it would not be fair; it would be asking you to give up too much."
The meek abnegation of her rather worn voice brings his remorse
uppermost again on the revolving wheel of his feelings.
"Is not it my turn to give up something?" he asks tenderly; "and
besides, it is time for me to settle! I am--I am tired of wandering!"
As this atrocious lie passes his lips, he catches his breath. Tired of
the Sierras! Tired of the bivouacs among the dazzling snow! Tired of the
august silence of the ever-lasting hills! Heaven forgive him for saying
so! Perhaps there is no great air of veracity in his assertion, for she
looks at him distrustfully; so distrustfully that he reshapes his
phrase: "At least, if I am not, I ought to be!"
But still she gazes at him with a wistful and doubting intentness.
"If I could only believe that that was true!"
"It is true," replies he, evading her look; "at least, true enough for
all working purposes; we all know that life is a series of compromises,
a balancing of gain and loss. I shall lose something, I do not deny
that, but I gain more--I gain _you_!"
"That is such a mighty gain, is it not?" she says with a melancholy
smile, as that intuition of the truth which sometimes comes to unloved
or tepidly loved women flashes upon her.
"A matter of taste--a mere matter of taste!" rejoins he hurriedly; aware
of the unreal ring in his own words, and trying, with all his might, to
feel as well as speak light-heartedly.
She shakes her head in a way which tells him how poorly he has
succeeded. In a desperate if not very well-judged attempt to convince
her of his sincerity, his next speech is uttered.
"Why should not we be married at once? to-morrow? the day after
to-morrow? at the Consulate--of course there _is_ a Consulate--or the
English church; I suppose there are half a dozen English churches. Why
not? We have nothing to wait for, and we are both of age!"
He has had no unkindly intention in the last words, but the moment that
these are out of his mouth, a glance at Amelia's unblooming face and
unyouthful figure tell him that they were not happily chosen. At the
first instant that the suggestion of an immediate marriage reaches the
hearer's brain, it sends a dart of joy over her features. To be married
at once! To put an end for ever to the interminable waiting, to enter at
last--at last upon the possession of the so long deferred Canaan. But in
a second, that first bright flash is chased away, and gives place to a
look of almost humiliation.
"You must be making fun of me, to suggest such a thing!" she says in a
wounded voice; "you know how wildly impossible it would be that I should
leave them all--my father--Sybilla--without any preparation."
"Without any preparation!" replies Jim, raising his eyebrows. "Have not
you been preparing them for the last eight years?"
He feels a vague unjust irritation with her for opposing his
proposition, though deep down in his heart he knows that he would have
felt a much greater annoyance had she eagerly closed with it. As she
does not answer a question, which the moment that it is uttered he feels
to have been rather brutal, he goes on, against his will, in the same
sarcastic key:
"I am afraid that you will have to leave them all some day; I am afraid
that our Bayswater mansion--by-the-bye, I am sure it will not be a
mansion, for I am sure it will not have a back-door--will not be likely
to contain all. Your father--Sybilla--Sybilla and her physic bottles
take up a good deal of room, do not they?"
It is fortunate for Amelia that she is too preoccupied by the thought of
her own next speech to take in the full acerbity of the last remark.
"If you would consent to wait till we get home--father does not mean to
stay in Italy beyond the end of next month--we might be married in June;
that" (with a pink flush of happiness) "would not be so long to wait."
In a second a sum of the simplest description executes itself in
Burgoyne's head. It is now the second week of April; they are to be
married in June, he has then eight weeks left. It shocks himself to find
that this is the way in which he puts it. All the overt action that he
permits himself, however, is to say with a shrug:
"As you will, then, as you will!" adding, since he feels that there is
something discourteous even to unchivalry in so bald an acquiescence in
his prospective bliss, "Of course, dear, the sooner I get you the better
for me!"
No lover could have been overheard giving utterance to a more proper or
suitable sentiment; so that it is lucky that this is just the moment
that Cecilia chooses for entering.
"Do not be afraid," she says, with a laugh. "I will not stay a minute,
but I just wanted to say 'How do you do?' How well you are looking! and
how young!"--with an involuntary glance of comparison from him to her
sister; a glance of which they are both rather painfully conscious.
"Ah!" (sighing) "with all your Rocky Mountain experiences, it is evident
that you have been having an easier time than we have!"
"Are you alluding to Sybilla?" asks Jim gravely. "I have no doubt, from
what I know of her powers in that line, that she has been extremely
trying."
"Yes, partly," replies the girl doubtfully; "but I have had troubles of
my own too. I dare say that Amelia has told you, or probably" (with a
second and heavier sigh) "you have been more pleasantly employed."
"Amelia did hint at some disaster," replies Jim, struggling to conceal
the rather grim smile which is curving his mouth, a feat the more
difficult since he has no moustache to aid him; "but I have been waiting
to hear all the details from yourself."
"I know that you are apt to think I fancy things," says Cecilia, sitting
down on a third hard chair, "but there could be no fancy in this case; I
am sure I was as much engaged as any girl ever was. I had chosen the
drawing-room paper and bought the dining-room grate!"
"That is further than we ever got, is not it, Amelia?" says Jim,
breaking, at the relation of this prosaic fact, into the laugh he has
been with difficulty swallowing; "but, Cis, if I were you, I should keep
the grate; one does not know how soon its services may be required
again!"
"It is all very well for you to joke," returns Cecilia, with an offended
air; "it may be play to you, but it is----"
"Not death, not quite death to you!" interrupts Burgoyne, glancing with
an expressive smile at her buxom outline. "I think you will live to
fight another day, will not you? But I really am extremely sorry; tell
me all about it."
"He was perfectly right when we left England," says Cecilia, mollified
at once, and apparently relieved by the invitation to unbosom herself of
her woes; "nobody could have been more so; he came to see us off at
Folkestone, and the tears were in his eyes; they were really, it was not
my imagination, was it, Amelia? And at first he wrote all right, and
said all the usual things; but then his letters gradually grew fewer and
fewer, and after I had written and telegraphed a great many times--I do
not know how many times I did not telegraph to ask whether he was ill,
and you know how expensive foreign telegrams are--he sent me a few
lines, oh, such cruel lines, were not they, Amelia? to say that, on
reflection, he feared that the feeling he had for me was not such as to
justify his entering on so sacred an engagement as marriage with me; but
he ought to have thought of that before, ought not he?"
"Undoubtedly!"
"I will never engage myself to a clergyman again," says Cecilia
pensively.
Burgoyne's thoughts have strayed at the mention of the cloth of his
sister-in-law elect's truant admirer, to that member of the same
profession who has lately robbed him of his heritage, and he replies
with a good deal of feeling:
"They do play one dirty turns now and then, do not they? Yes, Cis, stick
to laymen for the future!"
Cecilia receives this counsel with a melancholy sigh, fixing her large
eyes on the carpet, but presently resumes the conversation in a livelier
key.
"Let us talk about something pleasanter," she says. "Had you a good
journey? Do you like your travelling companion? Why did not you bring
him with you? Is he nice?"
"At all events, he is not a clergyman," replies Jim, with a rather
malicious smile; "but no, my dear, do not let your thoughts turn in that
direction! You must look at him as poor women look at diamonds!"
"I am sure I do not know what you mean!" replies Cecilia, reddening. "I
have not the slightest wish to look at him! I am not in spirits to
'look,' as you call it, at anyone!"
A moment later, she adds, with a suspicion of malice in her tone:
"We are certainly an unlucky family in our loves! I, heartlessly thrown
over, and Amelia engaged for eight years!"
Burgoyne smiles. "Amelia is not going to be engaged any longer," he
says, putting his arm round his betrothed. "Amelia is going to be
married at once!"