They are off now, there being nothing further to retard them, leaving
Sybilla _tete-a-tete_ with her thermometer. They are off, sociably
packed in one fiacre--
"Four precious souls, and all agog
To dash thro' thick and thin."
Not, indeed, that there is much dash about the Florentine
cab-horses--saddest among God's many sad creatures--with not a sound leg
among them, with staring coats and starting ribs, and poor broken knees;
and with their sadness emphasized by the feathers stuck in their tired
heads, as if to mock their wretchedness by a sort of melancholy
smartness! Sad as they are, it must be owned that they are the only sad
things in the cheerful Florentine streets, where no one seems over-busy,
where, out of the deep-eaved, green-shuttered houses, people lean,
talking to acquaintances on the shadowed pavement below. All the narrow
thorough-fares are full of bustling life; but there is no haggard
squalor apparently, no dreadful gin-palace gaiety. It does not follow
here that a man must be drunk because he sings. And down the strait,
colourful streets one looks--down a vista of houses diversely tall, each
with its cream-yellow face and its green shutters, varied here and there
by the towering bulk of some giant-blocked mountain-palace, through
whose grim, barred windows a woman peeps, or a little dog shows his
pointed nose--looks to where, in dwindling perspective, the view is
closed by a narrow picture of lucent purple hill, Fiesole or
Bellosguardo--names to which the tongue cleaves lovingly. Through the
gay streets, over bridge and blue Arno, our travellers go; their driver
cracking a prodigious whip, and with a tiny red dog, absurdly shaven,
and with nothing but a small woolly head and tail left of the original
design, seated gravely beside him. Away they go, pleasuring; but
pleasure and pleasuring are not always identical.
Burgoyne sits opposite Amelia; and as for Cecilia, it is to be supposed
that her heartache is for the moment dulled, since the same carriage-rug
covers her knees and those of Byng. Burgoyne does not look at Amelia;
nor, though his eyes are fixed upon the passing objects, does he at
first see aught of them. His vision is turned inwards, and to his own
soul he is mechanically repeating in dismal recitative, "A
double-barrelled, central fire, breech-loading gun, by Lancaster; made
strong enough at the breech to shoot a spherical bullet."
As for Amelia, her features are not of a build to express any emotion
with much brilliancy; but over them lies a deep and brooding content.
Amelia has not had much undiluted happiness in her life, but she is
exceedingly happy to-day. She is even strangely free from the carking
fear which usually assails her, of praising mistakenly, of being
enthusiastic in the wrong places, and passing over the right ones
unnoticed. If she keep to a vague generality of handsome adjectives, she
will surely do well enough, and, on this high holiday that her heart is
holding, he cannot be cross to her.
As to Byng, he is emphatically of the school of divinity taught by Tommy
Moore, nor was he ever known, when lacking "the lips that he loved," to
fail to make love to "the lips that are near." His taste is too good for
him to have chosen Cecilia as a companion; but, since fate has allotted
her to him for the afternoon, he finds no difficulty in making the best
of her. Nor, to do her justice, is she destitute of charms of a certain
kind, though her face has the inevitable air of commonness incident upon
a very short nose and a very long upper lip. But she has a good deal of
bloom, and of crisp, showy-coloured hair, and a very considerable
eye-power. Byng's attachment to the fair sex being of far too stout a
quality to be blunted by such trifles as an inch too much or too little
of nose or lip, he also, like Amelia, is thoroughly prepared to enjoy
himself.
Up the turning Via Galileo they climb, to the Basilica at the
top--stock-drive of all tourists--hackneyed as only Yankeedom and
Cockneydom, rushing hand in hand through all earth's sacredness, can
hackney. But even hackneying is powerless to take off the freshness to
the eye that sees it for the first time, of that view when he beholds
the Lily City lying close at his feet, so close that it seems he could
throw a stone into her Arno.
They have left their fiacre, and, as naturally happens in a _partie
carree_--more especially when one couple are betrothed lovers--have
broken into pairs. Burgoyne leans pensively on the terrace parapet, and
his sombre eyes rest on the band of sister hills, joining hands in
perpetual watch round valley and town; hills over which, in this late
spring, there is more a promise than a performance of that green and
many-coloured wealth of verdure and blossom that one associates with
Firenze's fair name. But it is a promise that is plainly on the verge of
a bounteous fulfilment. Then his look drops slowly to the city herself.
In what a little space comparatively does the Florence that is immortal
lie! The Duomo, the lily Campanile "made up of dew and sunshine," the
Baptistery, Santa Croce, the Palazzo Vecchio; he could compass them in a
ten minutes' walk. And around this small nucleus of the undying dead and
their work, what a nation of gleaming villas of the polyglot living--a
nation of every tongue, and people, and language! All over the hills is
the sheen of white walls, the verdure of tended gardens; they stretch
away almost to where the Apennines raise their cold white fronts against
the sky.
He rouses himself to remember that Amelia is beside him, and that he
ought to say something to her. So he makes a rather _banal_ observation
upon the smallness of the _enceinte_ that encloses so much loveliness.
"Yes, is not it tiny?" replies she, with the eager pleasure of having a
remark made to her which she cannot go wrong in answering. "Think of
London! Why, the whole thing is not as big as South Kensington or
Bayswater!"
He shudders. Must the accursed suburb pursue him even here?
"Let us go into the church," he says, in a tone that a little dulls his
companion's buoyancy.
She follows him crestfallenly, asking herself whether she has answered
amiss here also. She does not trust herself to any comment upon the
interior.
Byng and Cecilia are standing before the high altar, from over which a
mosaic Madonna stiffly beams upon them; and as the other couple approach
them, Burgoyne hears the words "drawing-room grate" issue from his
future sister-in-law's lips.
"Bravo, Cis!" he says in a dry aside; "you are getting on nicely! I did
not think that you would have reached the drawing-room grate till
to-morrow."
To avoid intruding further on her delicate confidences, and also to
escape from two Americans, who are nasally twanging Hare and Horner at
each other, varied by trips into Baedeker, he passes into a side chapel
made famous by one of the loveliest tombs that ever feigned to simulate
in marble death's ugliness. The Yankee voices are high and shrill, but
they had need to be higher and shriller still before they could break
the slumber of him whose resting-place Jim has invaded in his flight
from Cecilia and New York. Was ever rest so beautiful as this of the
young sleeper? A priest he was, nay cardinal, and youthful and lovely
and chaste! and now in how divine a slumber is he lapt! But how should
that four hundred years' slumber not be divine, watched by such a gentle
Mary-mother as is watching his; smiling as if to tell him that he does
well to sleep, that sleep is better than waking, that death is better
than life! There is a sunken look about his fair eyelids, as if he had
gone through suffering to his rest; and his reposeful hands are thin;
but below him, as he lies in his spotless marble tranquillity, upon his
sarcophagus, the rose garlands wave in lovely frieze, and the riotous
horses rear and plunge in fulness of life.
Burgoyne has not perceived that Amelia did not follow him. She has, in
point of fact, remained in the body of the church, immersed in her
guide-book, steadily working through the marble screen and pulpit, and
still five good minutes off the side chapel, in which her lover stands
in so deeply brown a study, that he is not aware of the intrusion upon
his solitude of two women, until he is roused with a leap by the voice
of one of them addressing--not him, of whose presence she is obviously
as unaware as was he of hers, until this moment--but her companion.
"Oh, mother! am I not a fool, at my age, too? but I cannot help it, it
makes me cry so!"
Burgoyne does not need the evidence of his eyes. His ears and his
startled heart have enough assured him whose are the tears called forth
by that indeed most touching effigy at which he himself has been so
pensively staring.
The mother's answer is inaudible; and then again comes the voice of
Elizabeth Le Marchant, tearful and vibrating.
"You know I have seen so few beautiful things in my life, I shall get
used to them presently; it is only sheer happiness that makes me----"
She stops abruptly, having evidently discovered for herself, or been
made aware by her mother of his vicinity; and even if she had not done
so, he feels that he must lose no time in announcing himself.
"Florence is a place that does make one often choky," he says, eagerly
taking the hand which she hesitatingly, and with some confusion, offers
him.
It is not quite true; Florence has never made him feel choky; and, if he
is experiencing that sensation now, it is certainly not the dead
cardinal of Portugal who is giving it to him.
"I am a fool, a perfect fool!" replies Elizabeth, hastily and
shamefacedly wiping away her tears.
To give her time to recover herself, and also because he has not yet
greeted the girl's mother, Jim turns to her.
"Did not I tell you that we should meet here?"
There is such undisguised joy and triumph in his tone, that perhaps Mrs.
Le Marchant has not the heart to dash his elation; at all events, he is
conscious in her tone of a less resolute determination to keep him at
arm's-length, than on their two last meetings.
"I do not think that I contradicted you," she answers, smiling.
He may steal another look at Elizabeth now. She is not crying any
longer. Indeed, despite the real moisture on her cheeks, she strikes him
as looking happier than at their last meeting; and though the interval
between now and then is too short for any such alteration to have taken
place in reality, yet he cannot help imagining that the hollows in those
very cheeks are less deep than when they stood together before the great
Vandyke in the Brignoli Sala Palace.
"And the _entresol_? is it all your fancy painted it?" he asks quickly,
feeling a sort of panic fear, that if he stops putting questions for one
minute they will slip out of his grasp again, as they did in the Genoese
Palace.
Elizabeth's face breaks into a soft bright smile. She has a dimple in
one cheek and not in the other. She must have had it ten years ago; how
comes he to have forgotten so sweet and strange a peculiarity?
"It is delightful--perfectly delightful!"
"Large enough to receive your friends in, after all?"
But the moment that the words are out of his mouth, he perceives that he
has made a false step, and is somehow treading dangerous ground.
Elizabeth's smile goes out, like a light blown into nothingness by a
sudden wind.
"We have not many friends," she murmurs; "we--we are not going out at
all."
He hastens to change his cue.
"Byng and I are at the Minerva," he says, beginning to talk very fast;
"I wonder if, by any chance, you are in our neighbourhood; have I
forgotten, or did you never tell me where the _entresol_ lies? Where is
it, by-the-bye?"
Ensnared by the wily and brazen suddenness of this demand, Miss Le
Marchant has evidently no evasion ready, and, after an almost
imperceptible pause of hesitation, answers:
"We are at 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio."
She is looking doubtfully and half uneasily in his face, as she gives
this answer, but he has scarcely time for a flash of self-congratulation
at having obtained the information, which he had never realized the
eagerness of his desire for until this moment, before he becomes aware
that his interlocutor's eyes are no longer meeting his, but have
wandered to some object over his shoulder. What that object is he is not
long left in doubt. Whether it is a genuine accident, or one of those
spurious ones, of which those who profit by them are the artificers, Jim
does not know; and, as he is at the time, and will be when he thinks of
the circumstance to the end of his life, too angry to question Byng on
the subject, it is pretty certain that he never _will_ know; but so it
is that at this moment the voice of his _protege_ breaks upon his ear:
"You are not going to give us the slip like this, old chap--oh! I beg
your pardon!"
But begging pardon ever so sweetly does not alter the fact that he has
rushed, like a bull in a china shop, into the middle of the dialogue.
All four look at each other for a second; then, since there is no help
for it, Jim presents his disciple, and the next moment the latter has
slid into talk with Elizabeth, and she is responding with an ease and
freedom from embarrassment such as had never marked her sparse and
hardly won utterances to the elder man.
Byng has the advantage of him, as he somewhat bitterly thinks. Byng has
no connection with "old times;" those poor old times which she and her
mother have so unaccountably taken _en grippe_. He seems suddenly
relegated, as by some natural affinity, to the mother. On their two last
meetings the eagerness to converse has been all on his side; yet now he
has nothing to say to her. It is she who addresses him.
"I hope that you found your young lady flourishing," she says civilly.
He gives a slight inward start, though--as he is thankful to feel--his
body is quiet. "His young lady!" Yes, of course he has a young lady! Has
there been any danger during the last five minutes of his forgetting
that fact? and has Mrs. Le Marchant done him an unnecessary service in
recalling it?
"Oh, yes, thanks, she is all right!"
"Is she still in Florence?"
"Yes, she is here; by-the-bye"--looking round with a sudden sense that
he ought to have missed her--"what has become of her? Oh, here she is!"
For even while the words are on his lips, Amelia and Cecilia come into
sight. Amelia with a shut Baedeker, and the serene look of an easy
conscience and a thoroughly performed duty on her amiable face; Cecilia
with a something of search and disquiet in her large rolling eye, which
would have made him laugh at another time.
A sudden instinct, with which his will has nothing to do, makes him
flash a look back at Mrs. Le Marchant, as if to gauge the effect
produced upon her by his betrothed; and, following her glance, he finds
that it is resting on Cecilia. She thinks that he is engaged to Cecilia.
The mistake is intolerable to him, and yet a second's reflection tells
him that it is a natural one. In a second he sees his Amelia as she
presents herself to a strange eye. Miss Wilson is only thirty-one, but
upon her has already come that set solid look of middle age, which
overtakes some women before they are well over the borders of youth, and
which other women manage to stave off till they are within near hail of
forty. Yes; the mistake is quite a natural one. Most people would
suppose that the showy Cecilia, still fairly youthful, and with so many
obvious and well-produced "points," must be his choice; and yet, as I
have said, the idea that anyone should credit him with her ownership is
intolerable to him.
"Here she is!" he cries precipitately. "The one to the right side, the
other is her sister; may I--may I present them to you?"
Perhaps it is his irritated fancy that dictates the idea, but it seems
to him as if he detected a sort of surprise in Mrs. Le Marchant's face,
when he effects the introduction he has proposed, and to which she
accedes courteously, after a pause of hesitation about as long as had
followed his inquiry of Elizabeth as to their address.
Five minutes later they have all sauntered out again on the terrace, and
Burgoyne is again leaning on the wall; but this time he has no fear of
hearing of Bayswater, for it is Elizabeth who is beside him. Since last
he looked at it half an hour ago, a sort of glorification has passed
over the divine view. Down where the river twists through the plain
country, there is a light, dainty mist, but the mountains have put on
their fullest glory. They are not green, or brown, or purple, or blue;
but clad in that ineffable raiment woven by the sun, that defies our
weak vocabulary to provide it with a name. A little snow-chain lies on
the sun-warmed neck of Morello, and along the tops of the further
Apennines, right against the acute blue of the heavens, lies a line of
snow, that looks like a fleece-soft cloud resting from its journeyings
on their crests; but it is no cloud, nor is there any speck upon the
gigantic complete arch that over-vaults town and valley and radiant
mountains. In the folds of these last, the shadows slumber; but over all
the city is the great gold glory of spring. The one thing in Florence
that frowns among so many smiles is the scowling Pitti, and that, from
here, is invisible. Nearer to him, against the azure, stand the solemn
flame-shaped cypresses arow, and beside them--as unlike as life to
death--a band of quivering poplars, a sort of transparent gold-green in
their young spring livery. The air is so clear that one can go nigh to
counting the marbles on the Duomo walls. In a more transparent amber
light, fuller of joy and gaiety, cannot the saved be dancing around, as
in Fra Angelico's divine picture? cannot they be walking in the New
Jerusalem of St. John's great dream? Only in the New Jerusalem there are
no galled and trembling-kneed fiacre horses.
Elizabeth is sitting on the wall, her light figure--is it possible that
it has been in the world only four years less than Amelia's solid
one?--half-supported by one small gray hand outspread on the stone; her
little fine features all tremulous with emotion, and half a tear
gathered again in each sweet eye. As Jim looks at her, a sort of cold
covetous gripe pinches his heart.
"What a woman with whom to look at all earth's loveliness--with whom to
converse without speech!"
Even as he so thinks, she turns her head towards him, and, drawing in
her breath with a long low sigh, says:
"Oh, how glad I am I did not die before to-day!"
Her eyes are turned towards him, and yet, as once before, he realizes
that it is not to him that either her look or her thoughts are directed.
Both are aimed at an object over his shoulder, and, as before, that
object is Byng. Byng, too, has been gazing at the view. There are tears
in Byng's eyes also. Stevenson says that some women like a man who
cries. Byng cries easily and genuinely, and enjoys it; and, as he is a
remarkably fine young man, there is something piquant in the contrast
between his wet blue orbs and his shoulders.
As Burgoyne rolls home that afternoon in his fiacre, as before, placed
opposite Amelia, his mental vision is no longer fixed upon a
"double-barrelled, central fire, breech-loading gun;" it is fixed with a
teasing tenacity upon the figure of a smallish woman, perennially
looking, through brilliant tears, over his shoulder at somebody else.