It would seem natural that, after so long a separation, Burgoyne should
dine and spend the evening with his betrothed; but such is not the case.
For this, however, he is not to blame; he is quite prepared to stay with
her until she turns him out. Had he not better school himself to
domestic habits, since he is so soon to assume them for life? But in
consideration for Sybilla he is dismissed undined. It is not that she
ever shares the family dinner at their table _a part_ in the _salle a
manger_, but the thought of their entertaining a guest with a
conviviality far greater in her imagination than would be the case in
reality, while she herself lies lonely on her couch of suffering, preys
upon her spirits so much that her family have to abandon the idea. So,
towards sunset, Jim is dismissed. He has no opportunity for any parting
endearments to his lady-love, as the whole family are in the room, and
it is Cecilia, not Amelia, who volunteers to walk across the hotel
courtyard with him, for the advantage of a last word. What that last
word is he is not slow to learn.
"You will take us some excursions, will not you?" she says, with a
persuasive air, putting her arm through his. "Father is so
unenterprising, we have really seen scarcely anything; but you will take
us some excursions now, will not you?"
"Are you sure that your spirits are equal to them?" inquires Burgoyne
unkindly.
"I do not know about that, I am sure," replies she, growing pink at his
tone; "but one must make an exertion sometime, and I think a little
distraction would do me good, and so I am sure it would to poor Amelia!"
"Poor Amelia will shortly have the distraction of being married,"
rejoins the young man, who feels as if he could not repeat the statement
of this fact too often to himself and others.
"And I think it would be only civil," continues Cecilia persistently,
"in fact, I do not see how you could avoid it, if you invited your
friend to join us."
But Jim escapes without having committed himself to this promise, and
wanders about the town in the lovely, lowering light; finds himself on
the Lung Arno, strolling along with the leisurely loiterers, among whom,
for every two soft Tuscan voices, there is a loud metallic Anglo-Saxon
one. He watches the carriages rolling back from their drive on the
Cascine; the river falling over the weir; the river yellow as Tiber
yesterday, and to day shot with blue and green and silver, as it tumbles
with a pleasant noise. The houses on either side of the Arno, the domes
and roofs, are all clothed in a strange serenity of yellow light; a
golden air so transparent and line and crystal clear, so free from the
soft blur of mist--lovely too--through which we see objects in our wet
green home, that Jim feels as if he could stretch out his hand and touch
the hill that backs gold towers and bridges, and see whether it really
is made out of one whole amethyst, as it looks. The beauty of the world
has always been very much to Burgoyne, though hitherto it has been
chiefly in the austerity of her high and desert places that he has bowed
the knee before the Universal Mother. This little gold evening city,
sunset clad in the colours of the New Jerusalem, lifting her heavenly
campanile to as heavenly a sky, is to him a new and wonderful thing. Her
loveliness sinks into his soul, and with it a companion sadness as deep.
From henceforth the sight of earth's fair shows will be, for the most
part, forbidden him. He has always loved to look and adore in silence
and alone; henceforth he will never have the right to be alone;
henceforth he will never have the right to go anywhere without his wife.
Strange and terrible word to which he tries in vain to accustom his
mental ears; and, thanks to the narrowness of their means, neither of
them will be able to stir from the strait precincts of their pinched
home.
He comes back to his hotel, through the Piazza of the Duomo. All the
infinite richness of cupola and arch, high up, are still wrapped in the
fiery rose cloak of sunset, while below the body of the great church,
with all its marbles and traceries and carved wonders, is clad in the
sobriety of twilight.
On reaching the Minerva, he finds that Byng has not yet returned, or
rather that he has been in and gone out again. He waits dinner
half-an-hour for him, and then dines without him; dines in solitude,
since it is not till his cup of coffee is before him, and his cigarette
between his lips, that his young friend appears. It is evidently no
unpleasant errand that has detained him, for he arrives beaming, and too
excited even to perceive the _menu_ which a waiter offers him.
"They have arrived!" he cries. Oddly enough it never occurs to Burgoyne
to inquire who "they" may be; it seems as much a matter-of-course to him
as to the handsome pink and white boy before him, that the pronoun must
relate to Elizabeth Le Marchant and her mother.
His only answer, however, is an "Oh!" whose tone is rather more eagerly
interested than he could have wished.
"I thought that they could not stay more than another day in Genoa,"
continues Byng, at length becoming aware of the _menu_ at his elbow; but
only to wave it impatiently away. "So I thought I would just run down to
the station to meet the evening train, the one we came by last night;
however, it must have been more punctual than yesterday, for before I
reached the station, I met them; I mean they passed me in a fiacre. I
only caught a glimpse of her face, but I saw her hand; it was lying on
the carriage door like a snow-flake."
"Like my grandmother!" cries Burgoyne in a rage, for which he cannot
quite account to himself, at this ingenious and novel simile.
Byng laughs; the laugh of a thoroughly sweet-natured person, who, in
addition, has some special cause for good-humour.
"I do not know what colour your grandmother was; but she must have been
very unlike most people's if she was like a snow-flake."
Jim's cross mouth unbends into a reluctant smile. It is not the first
time that he has discovered how useless, and also impossible, it is to
be out of humour with Byng.
"I had a good mind to tell my fiacre man to follow them," continued
Byng, in an excited voice; "but, in the first place, I did not know how
to say it--really, Jim, we must get up a little of the lingo--and, in
the second place, I thought it would perhaps be rather too much in the
private detective line."
"I think it would have been extremely ungentlemanlike!" rejoins Jim
severely.
Byng reddens; but still without losing his temper.
"That is coming it rather strong, is not it? but anyhow, I did not do
it." And then, by tacit agreement, they both drop the subject.
During the next three or four days it is not named between them, nor
indeed do they see much of each other. Burgoyne spends the greater part
of his days with Amelia. Whatever cause for the accusation he may have
given during the previous eight years, nobody can say that he neglects
her now. He passes long hours at her side, on the same hard chair that
had supported him on their first interview, in the little dismal
dining-room; going into calculations of house-rent and taxes, drawing up
lists of necessary furniture. He even makes a bid for Cecilia's
drawing-room grate; but that young lady, whose forecasting mind can look
beyond present grief to future sunshine, refuses to part with it. The
lovers are not always, however, studying Maple's and Oetzmann's lists.
Sometimes Jim varies the diversion by taking his future wife to
picture-galleries and churches, to the Uffizi, the Accademia, San
Lorenzo. It is doubtful whether Amelia enjoys these excursions as much
as she does the selection of bedsteads and saucepans, her pleasure being
in some degree marred by a feverish anxiety to say what she thinks her
lover expects of her as they stand before each immortal canvas. In her
heart she thinks the great statues in the Medici Chapel frightful, a
heresy in which she is kept in countenance by no less a light than
George Eliot, who in one of her letters dares to say of them, "they
remained to us as affected and exaggerated in the original, as in copies
and casts." To Amelia many of the frescoes appear lamentably washed out,
nor are her efforts to hide these sentiments attended with any
conspicuous success, since nothing is more hopeless than for one utterly
destitute of a feeling for works of art to feign it, without having the
imposture at once detected.
Burgoyne's mind during these expeditions is a battle-ground for pity and
rage; pity at the pathos of his poor love's endeavours; rage at their
glaring failure. Cecilia sometimes accompanies the lovers, but this does
not make matters much better. Cecilia devotes but a very cursory notice
to the pictures; her attention being almost wholly centred on the
visitors, and on finding resemblances for them among the inhabitants of
her own village at home, for the accuracy of which she appeals at every
moment to her sister. Every day she asks Burgoyne to fulfil his
promise--a promise which he as punctually assures her that he never
made--to introduce his friend to her. He has a strangely strong
reluctance to comply with this simple request, which yet, he knows, will
have to be complied with some day. When Amelia is his wife, Byng will
have to know Cecilia, for she will probably spend a great deal of her
time with them--make their house a second home, in fact.
And meanwhile Jim is keenly, and for some reason sorely, conscious of
the fact that, during the hours in which he is stooping his weary head
over catalogues of fenders and fire-irons, carving-knives and
fish-slices, blankets and ticking, Byng is searching Florence through
her length and breadth for their two countrywomen. It is not indeed
necessary to credit his friend with any special quest to account for his
wanderings through the "adorable little city," as Henry James most truly
calls it, since he is a young man of a wide and alert curiosity, with a
large appetite for pleasure both intellectual and the reverse. Jim,
whose acquaintance with him has chiefly been with his rowdy
undergraduate side, bear-fighting, and proctor-defying, is astonished at
his almost tremulous appreciation of the Ghirlandajos, the Lorenzo di
Credis, the Giottos, that in a hundred chapels, from a hundred walls,
shine down in their mixed glory of naive piety and blinding colour upon
him.
One day the elder man is sitting in his bedroom with a despatch-box and
a sheet of paper before him. He is embarked upon a dreary calculation as
to what his guns will fetch. He has made up his mind to sell them. Of
what further use can they be to him? He will not be allowed to shoot at
the Bayswater omnibuses, which will be the only game henceforth within
his reach. While he is thus employed upon an occupation akin to, and
about as cheerful as, that of Rawdon Crawley before Waterloo, Byng
enters.
"You look as if you had a headache, old chap," he says, sitting down
upon his friend's bed.
"If you had been going through as many kitchen-ranges as I have this
morning, perhaps you would have a headache," replies Jim gravely. "You
know that I am going to be married as soon as I get home."
Byng nods; and Burgoyne, while inwardly blessing the tact that spares
him any congratulations, takes himself to task for having made the
announcement so lugubriously as to render felicitation obviously
inapplicable.
"When are you going to introduce me to Miss Wilson?" asks Byng
presently. "If you shirk it much longer, I shall think that you are
ashamed of me."
Jim glances affectionately, yet not quite comfortably, at his young
friend, and the thought dashes across his mind that, in his last remark,
the latter has put the saddle on the wrong horse.
"You have so large an acquaintance in Florence already," he says, with
some stiffness, "that I did not know that you would care to add to it."
"One cannot have too much of a good thing," replies the other joyously.
"You know I love my fellow-creatures; and in this case," he adds
civilly, "I do care very much."
Burgoyne's eyes are bent on the paper before him, which contains the
melancholy enumeration of his firearms--"A 500 double-barrelled express,
by Henry, of Edinburgh; a 450 single-barrelled ditto, by same maker,"
etc., etc.--as he says slowly:
"I shall be very happy."
His acceptance of the proposition can hardly be called eager; but of
this Byng appears unawares.
"When shall it be, then? To-day--this afternoon?"
"No-o-o; not to-day, I think. It has been arranged that we are to go to
San Miniato--Amelia, her sister, and I."
"Three of you?" cries Byng, raising his eyebrows. "Then why not four?
Why may not I come too?"
There being, in point of fact, no reason why he should not, and
Cecilia's morning prayer being still ringing in her future
brother-in-law's ears, he gives a dull and lagging assent; so that at
about three o'clock the two men present themselves at the door of the
Wilsons' apartment at the Anglo-Americain Hotel. That Sybilla is not
expecting visitors is evident by the fact that, at the moment of their
entrance, she is taking her own temperature--a very favourite relaxation
of hers--with a clinical thermometer. She removes the instrument from
her mouth without indecent haste, and holds out a languid white hand to
Byng.
"So you are going off on a long afternoon's pleasuring?" she says, with
a pathetic smile. "I am so glad that neither of my sisters is going to
stay at home with me. We invalids must guard against growing selfish,
though I think that is perhaps more the danger with _malades
imaginaires_; we real ones have learnt our lesson of suffering better, I
hope."
"You do not look so very ill," replies Byng, in his sympathetic voice,
letting his eyes rest caressingly on the prostrate figure, which has yet
no smallest sign of emaciation about it.
"Ah, that is because of my colour," replies Sybilla, with an animation
slightly tinged with resentment. "You, too, fall into that common error.
My London doctor tells me that there is no such unerring indication of
radical delicacy of constitution as a fixed pink colour like mine; the
more feverish I am, the deeper it grows. It is very hard"--smiling again
sadly--"for one gets no pity!"
"Where is Cecilia?" cries Jim brusquely, and fidgeting in his chair.
"Why is not she ready?"
As he speaks, the young lady in question enters--so obviously arrayed
for conquest, in so patently new a hat, and such immaculate pale gloves,
that across Burgoyne's mind there flashes, in vexed mirth, the
recollection of the immortal caution addressed by Major O'Dowd to his
friend and comrade, "Moind your oi, Dob, my boy!" Would he not do well
to repeat it to his friend?