"Was it 12, or 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio?"
There are no tears in Byng's eyes as he asks this question next
morning--asks it of his friend, as the latter sits in the Fumoir, with
an English paper in his hands, and a good cigar between his clean-shaven
lips. It has struck him several times lately that he will have to give
up good cigars, and take to a churchwarden pipe and shag instead. But,
so far, the churchwarden and the shag remain in the future.
"12, or 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio?" inquires Byng.
"Was _what_ 12 or 12 bis?" replies his friend, with a somewhat obviously
intentional obtuseness; but Byng is far too thoroughly healthy and happy
a young animal this morning to take offence easily.
"I mean Miss Le Marchant's address," he answers, explaining as amiably
as if he had not been perfectly aware that it was only "cussedness" that
had dictated the query.
There is a slight pause. Burgoyne would like to answer that he does not
remember--would like still more to answer that he does not see what
business it can be of Byng's; but, since he is not destitute of
common-sense, a second's reflection shows him that he has no good reason
for either the lie or the incivility, so he replies, pretty calmly, with
his eyes still on his leading article:
"I believe Miss Le Marchant said 12 bis."
Having obtained the information he wanted, and finding his companion not
conversationally disposed, Byng is moving away again, when he is
arrested by Jim's voice, adding to the intelligence he has just given
the monosyllable:
"Why?"
"Why what?" asks Byng, returning readily, and laughingly mimicking the
intentional obtuseness so lately practised on himself by the other.
"Why did you ask?"
"I am thinking of paying my respects there this afternoon, and I did not
want to ring at the wrong bell."
A short silence. Jim's head is partly hidden by his _Galignani_.
"Did Miss or Mrs. Le Marchant ask you to call?"
Byng laughs.
"Both of them are as innocent of it as the babe unborn!"
"You asked yourself then?" (in a snubbing voice).
Byng nods.
"And she said yes?"
The plural pronoun has dropped out of sight, but neither of them
perceives it. The younger man shakes his sleek head. Jim lays down his
paper with an air of decision.
"If she did not say 'Yes'--if she said 'No,'" he begins, with an accent
of severity, "I fail to understand----"
"She did not say 'No,'" interrupts Byng, still half laughing, and yet
reddening as well. "She began to say it; but I suppose that I looked so
broken-hearted--I am sure I felt it--that she stopped."
As Jim makes no rejoinder, he continues by-and-by:
"After all, she can but send me away. One is always being sent away"
(Jim wishes he could think this truer than he does); "but now and again
one is not sent, and those are the times that pay for the others! I'll
risk it."
There is a hopeful ring in his voice as he ends, and again a pause
comes, broken a third time by the younger man.
"Come now, Jim"--looking with a straight and disarming good humour into
his friend's overcast countenance--"speak up! Do you know of any cause
or impediment why I should not?"
Thus handsomely and fairly appealed to, Burgoyne, who is by nature a
just man, begins to put his conscience through her paces as to the real
source of his dislike to the idea of his companion's taking advantage of
that introduction which he himself has been the means--however
unwillingly--of procuring for him. It is true that Byng's mother had
adjured him, with tears in her eyes, to preserve her boy from
undesirable acquaintances; but can he, Burgoyne, honestly say that he
looks upon Elizabeth Le Marchant as an undesirable acquaintance for
anyone? The result of his investigations is the discovery of how
infinitesimal a share in his motives regard for his young friend's
welfare has had. The discovery is no sooner made than he acts upon it.
"My dear boy," he says--and to his credit says it heartily--"I see no
earthly reason why you should not go; you could not make nicer friends."
"Then why will not you come too?" asks Byng, with boyish generosity.
The other shakes his head. "They had much rather I stayed away; they
have taken me _en grippe_."
"Pooh! Nonsense! You fancy it."
"I think not"--speaking slowly and thoughtfully--"I am not a fanciful
person, nor apt to imagine that my acquaintances bother their heads
about me one way or another; but when people try their best, in the
first instance, to avoid recognising you at all, and on every subsequent
occasion endeavour to disappear as soon as you come in sight, it is not
a very forced assumption that they are not exactly greedy for your
society."
This reasoning is so close that Byng is for the moment silenced; and it
is the other who shortly resumes:
"I think it is because I remind them of the past; they have evidently
some unpleasant association of ideas with that past. I wonder what it
is."
The latter clause is addressed more to himself than to Byng.
"Perhaps some of them have died, or come to grief, and they are afraid
of your asking after them," suggests the younger man.
"On the contrary--they are all--one more flourishing than another."
"Well, I would give them one more trial, anyhow; I am sure they would
come round. Give them time, and I am sure they would come round!" cries
Byng sanguinely; adding, "What could have been pleasanter than Mrs. Le
Marchant's manner when you presented her to Miss Wilson?"
The mention of Miss Wilson recalls to Jim the extremely unpleasant
moment of that presentation, thus brought back to him--the moment when
Amelia had looked so middle-aged, and Cecilia so flashy; recalls to him
also the conviction that has been growing upon him since yesterday, of
the more than wisdom, the absolute imperative duty on his part, of
avoiding a repetition of that comparison which had forced itself upon
his notice in the church of San Miniato.
"You had better come," persists Byng still, like a magnanimous child,
holding out half his cake to his friend; whether, like the same child,
with a semi-hope that it may be refused, or whether, on the other hand,
it may have crossed his mind that, where there are two visitees, the
chances of a _tete-a-tete_ are improved by there being also two
visitors.
"My dear boy," returns Jim, this time with a testiness handsomely
streaked with irony, "you are really too obliging; but, even if I wished
it--which I do not--or even if _they_ wished it--which they do _not_--it
is in this case quite impossible, as I am engaged to go shopping with
Amelia."
Probably the blow is not a knockdown one to Byng; at all events, he
bears the rebuff with his habitual healthy good temper, and goes off to
put on a smarter tie. Burgoyne, thinking no such improvement in his
toilette necessary, strolls away to the Anglo-Americain. It is true that
he has covenanted to escort Amelia to the shop for Cantagalli ware,
though there is no particular reason why, had he so wished it, the
purchase of the dinner-service that is to grace their Bayswater symposia
might not have been deferred for twenty-four hours; and indeed, as
things turn out, it has to be so deferred.
As he opens the door of the Wilson sitting-room his future father-in-law
brushes past him, with evident signs of discomposure all over his
clerical figure and spectacled face; and, on entering, he finds equal,
if not superior, marks of upset equanimity on the countenances of the
three women that are the room's occupants. Over the wood fire--Sybilla
alternately roasts and freezes her family, and this is one of her
roasting days--Cecilia is stooping, in evident search for some object
that has been committed, or tried to be committed, to the flames. The
other two are looking on with an air of vexed interest. Sybilla is the
first to address him.
"You have appeared at a not very happy moment," she says, with a sigh;
"we have been having a family breeze; it has sent my temperature up
nicely! It is 100, 100, Point 2."
The mention of Sybilla's temperature is always enough to put Jim in a
rage. It is therefore in no very feeling tone that he returns:
"If it were 1,000, Point 99, I should not be surprised, in this
atmosphere! Good Heavens, Cis, are not you hot enough already?"
The young lady thus apostrophised rises, with some precipitation, and
with a very heated complexion, from her knees, holding in her hand,
however, the object of her quest--a rather charred small parcel, done up
in white paper, and with a fragment of white ribbon still adhering here
and there to it.
"Father behaves so childishly," she says, with irritated undutifulness.
"You must own that it was enough to provoke him," strikes in Amelia's
mild voice.
"What was enough to provoke him? How has he shown his childishness? For
Heaven's sake, some of you explain!" cries Jim impatiently, looking from
one to the other.
But with this request none of the three appears in any hurry to comply.
There is a distinct pause before Cecilia, seeing neither of her seniors
shows any signs of relieving her of the burden of explanation, takes
that burden upon herself.
"The fact is," she says, setting her little rescued packet on the table
beside her, and beginning to fan herself, "that Mr. Dashwood, the man to
whom I was engaged, has chosen to marry. I am sure"--with a shrug--"no
one has the least desire to deny his perfect right to do so; and this
morning there arrived by post a bit of his wedding-cake! I suppose he
meant it civilly; but father chose to take it as an insult to himself,
and though it was addressed to me, he threw it into the fire. I am very
fond of wedding-cake; so, as soon as father's back was turned, I fished
it out again!"
Jim laughs, with more vigour perhaps than heartfelt amusement.
"Bravo, Cis! You are a real philosopher! We might all learn a lesson
from you."
"What have you done with your nice friend?" asked Sybilla languidly.
"Amelia, dear, this _couvre-pied_ is slipping off me again. What a
sympathetic voice he has! I am sure he has been a great deal with sick
people."
"I left him putting on his best tie to go out calling. No, calm
yourself, Cecilia, not on you; it is not your turn to-day."
"Whose turn is it then?" asks the girl, with an interest not at all
blunted by the mortifying incident of the cake, which, indeed, she has
begun to nibble with apparent relish.
Jim hesitates a second--a second during which it strikes him with a
shock that he already finds a difficulty in pronouncing Elizabeth Le
Marchant's name. He manages to evade the necessity even now by a
circumlocution.
"I believe it is the Piazza d'Azeglio upon which that luminary is to
shine."
"Is he going to see that lovely creature to whom you introduced me
yesterday?" cries Amelia, with good-natured enthusiasm. "I heard her
telling him that she lived in the Piazza d'Azeglio. Oh, Jim, how pretty
she is! One ought to pay for being allowed to look at her."
Many women, whose plainness is incontestable, are able to be just to
their better favoured sisters; but Amelia is more than just--she is
lavishly generous.
Burgoyne rewards her with an affectionate look--a look such as would
make her swear that, beside Miss Le Marchant, as beside Dumain's fair
love,
"Juno but an Ethiop were!"
"She looks as if she had had a history; that always improves a woman's
appearance," says Cecilia pensively, holding a fragment of the fateful
cake suspended in air, and regarding it with a melancholy eye. "Has
she?"
"I never asked her."
"Why did not you go too?" inquires Amelia, judiciously striking in, as
is her habit, as often as she perceives that her younger sister is
beginning to get too obviously upon her own _fiance's_ nerves; a
catastrophe which something in the tone of his last remark tells
her--though she does not quite understand why it should--is imminent.
"They are old friends of yours, are not they? They may be hurt if they
find that a perfect stranger like Mr. Byng is in a greater hurry to
visit them than you are."
Before Burgoyne's mental vision rises a picture of Elizabeth's heavenly
eye wandering indifferently over the dear old friend's shoulder to find
its home in that of the perfect stranger. But he says kindly, and even
playfully:
"Why did not I go too? Because I was under the impression that I was
engaged to go with another lovely being to choose crockery, was I not?
Am I not?"
Amelia's answer is conveyed by a series of nods and winks executed
behind her sisters' backs, which he presently understands to imply that
she desires a private interview. It is not immediately that he grasps
what she is driving at, since dumb-show is often puzzling to the person
at whom it is aimed, though clear as day to the dumb-shower. As soon,
however, as he masters what her wish is, he hastens to comply with it;
and five minutes later finds them _tete-a-tete_ in the hideous little
dining-room which had been the scene of their reunion, and of many
after-meetings.
"I could not say so, of course, before _her_," remarks Miss Wilson, as
soon as they are out of earshot, "or she might have insisted upon my
going. She is very unselfish sometimes; but the fact is, I do not think
I ought to leave Sybilla again to-day. You see, she was alone the whole
of yesterday afternoon; and when we came back we found her in a very low
way. She had been reading her book of prescriptions--you know the book;
all the prescriptions which she has had for the last ten years bound up
together--and we rather dread her bringing it out, as she always fancies
that she is going to have the disease prescribed for."
"Humph!"
"And, after all, happiness ought not to make one selfish, ought it?"
says Amelia, with a gentle sigh of abnegation, as she ruffles her
pale-haired head against his coat-sleeve. "I have so much of you
now--oh, so much!--not to speak of----"
"Cecilia, of course, is incapacitated by grief?" interrupts Jim
brusquely. "She will be going up and down upon the mountains like
another unfortunate fair one. But your father? He will be at home, will
he not?"
"Yes, he will be at home," replies Amelia, slowly and doubtfully, as if
not finding a very satisfactory solution in this suggested arrangement;
"but, as you know, it never answers to leave father and Sybilla alone
together for long. You see, he does not believe that there is anything
the matter with her; he thinks that she is as well as you or I" (a gush
of warm feeling towards his father-in-law rushes over Jim's heart); "and
though he tries to prevent himself from showing it to her, yet I am
afraid, poor dear, that he is not very successful."
Jim laughs.
"And to-day," continues Amelia, "he is naturally a good deal upset about
Cecilia and that wedding-cake; it _was_ very impertinent to send it--was
not it?--though she does not seem to see it. I hope"--with a wistful
smile, and a repetition of the fond friction of her head against his
sleeve--"that when _you_ throw _me_ over----"
This is a hypothesis, suggested with perhaps unwise frequency by poor
Miss Wilson, which never fails to exasperate Jim.
"If we are going to talk nonsense," he breaks in brusquely, and with no
attempt to return or reward her caressing gesture, "I may as well go."
"Go to the Piazza d'Azeglio," says she coaxingly, her spirits raised by
the harshness of tone of his interruption of her speech, and half
persuading herself that it owes its birth to the supposition being too
painful to be faced by him.
He looks at her strangely for a moment, then--"Why do you wish me to go
to the Piazza d'Azeglio?" he asks, in a tone that is no longer overtly
cross, only constrained and odd. "Why are you driving me there?"
"Because I think you would like it," she answers; "because"--taking his
hand and passing her lips, which he feels to be trembling a little, very
gently over the back of it--"because all through your life I want you to
have exactly what you like, always."
He draws his hand away; not unkindly, but as if shocked at the humility
of her action.
"That is so likely," he says mournfully.