There is no particular mirth in Burgoyne's mind as he mounts the stone
stairs of the house which announces itself as 12 bis, in the commonplace
new square of the Piazza d'Azeglio. But yet it is evident that, if he
wishes to be in tune with the mood of the family to whom he is going to
pay his respects, he must be not only mirthful, but musical. As the door
of the _entresol_, to which he is directed by the porter, opens in
answer to his ring, bursts of laughter, among which he can plainly
detect the voice of Byng, assail his ear, mingled with music, or rather
noise of a sort, but what sort his ear, without fuller evidence than is
yet before it, is unable to decide. The person who has admitted him is
an elderly Englishwoman, whose features at once strike him as
familiar--so familiar that it needs scarcely one reaching back of
memory's hand to capture the fact of her having filled the office of
nurse at the Moat, at the period when the nursery there had been the
scene of those frantic romps in which he himself had taken a prominent
part, and in which Elizabeth had been to him by turns so able a second,
or so vigorous an adversary. He would like to claim acquaintance with
her, and, perhaps, if she had made any difficulty as to admitting him,
might have screwed up his courage to do so; but as she lets him in
without delay or hesitation, he follows her in silence along the passage
of a by no means imposing little _entresol_--they are not so well off as
they used to be, is his passing thought--is ushered into a small
sitting-room, and, entering behind his own name, which has been
completely drowned by the din issuing from within, has time, before the
consciousness of his own appearance has disturbed it, to take in the
details of a group which his entry naturally breaks up. Set slantwise
across one angle of the room is an open cottage-piano, and beside it
stands Elizabeth, her elbow resting on the top, and all her pensive face
convulsed with helpless laughter. Upon the music-stool is seated a large
collie dog, supported from behind in an upright position by Byng. Before
him is a score of music, from which he is obviously supposed to be
playing, as indeed he is doing in a sense--that is to say, he is
bringing down first one large paw and then another heavily on the keys,
accompanying each crash with a short howl to express the agony inflicted
upon his nerves by his own performance. The scene is so entirely
different a one from what he had expected: the immoderately laughing
Elizabeth has so much more kinship with the sweet hoyden of the Moat
than with the pale woman with a history of his two last meetings, that
for a second or two Burgoyne stands in the doorway as if stunned. It is
not till Mrs. Le Marchant, coming out of an inner room, advances to
greet him, that he recovers himself.
"How do you do?" she says, smiling, and with less constraint than he has
of late learnt to expect. "Are you fond of music?" (putting, as she
speaks, her hands up to her ears). "I hope so! Did you ever hear such a
shocking noise?"
"I do not know which I admire most, the vocal or the instrumental part
of the performance," replies he, laughing; but even as he speaks both
cease.
Elizabeth lifts her elbow from the piano, and Byng removes his hands
from under the dog's arms, who at once, joyful and released, jumps down,
upsetting his music-stool with the impetus of his descent, and yet
immediately, with all a dog's real good-heartedness, begins to swing a
handsome tail, to show that he bears no real malice for the odious
practical joke that has been played upon him. The clamorous fall of dog
and music-stool reveals an object which had been hidden behind both, in
the shape of a little boy, in whose behalf, as it darts across Jim's
mind, the eccentric concert, for which he has come in, must have been
got up.
"Oh, _do_ go on!" cries the child shrilly. "Oh, _do_ make him do it
again! Oh, why do you stop?"
And indeed through the whole of the ensuing conversation this cry recurs
at short intervals with the iteration of a guinea-hen. But none of the
three performers seems disposed to comply with this request. Two of them
sit down decorously on chairs, and the third throws himself upon the
floor panting, showing a fine red tongue, and dragging himself
luxuriously along on his stomach to show his relief at his _corvee_
being ended. The child has followed Elizabeth, and now stands beside
her, tiresomely pulling at her white hands.
"Bertie has come to spend the day with us," she says, looking
explanatorily up at Jim, but speaking with a formality very different,
as he feels, from the exuberant ease and mirth that had marked her
intercourse with Byng.
Jim had already had a flash of speculation about the child, as to
whether he might be a late-come little brother, arrived on the scene at
a period subsequent to his own connection with the family; since plainly
the span of his small life did not stretch to a decade.
"Bertie is a new friend," he says kindly. "I do not know Bertie."
"His mother, Mrs. Roche, is a cousin of ours; she has a villa on
Bellosguardo. Perhaps you know her?"
"I am going to a party at her house on Wednesday," cries Jim, in a tone
of eager pleasure at the discovery of this fresh link, and of the vista
of probable meetings which it opens up. "I shall meet you there?"
Elizabeth turns her head slightly aside and shakes it as slightly.
"No?"
"We are not going out."
The formula implies mourning, and yet the clothes both of Elizabeth and
her mother are unmistakably coloured ones, and give no indication of an
even moderately recent loss. But it is so clear that Miss Le Marchant
means to add no explanation that he has to change the subject.
"Though Bertie is not an old friend," he says, smiling, "yet I have come
across one here to-day--she opened the door to me; I should have liked
to shake hands with her, only she looked so haughty--she never used to
look haughty at the Moat."
"Do you mean nurse?" she asks.
"Yes, I knew her in an instant; she is not in the least changed, less
even"--hesitating a little, as if doubtful whether the stiffness of
their new relations warranted a personality--"less even than you."
She snatches a hasty look at him, a look upon which he sees, to his
surprise, imprinted a character of almost fear.
"You must be laughing at me," she says, in a voice in which he detects
an undoubted tremor; "I am very much changed."
There is such obvious apprehension in her whole manner, that his one
thought--after a first flash of astonishment--is to reassure her.
"Of course I was only speaking of externals," he says quickly; "ten
years could hardly be expected to leave any of us quite where we were as
to our inner selves;" then, seeing her still look flurried, and becoming
himself nervous, he adds, rather stupidly, the hackneyed Swinburnian
couplet--
"'Time turns the old days to derision,
Our loves into corpses or wives!'
though I never could see that that was quite a necessary alternative!"
Ere the words are out of his mouth she has risen with precipitation, and
begun hurriedly to re-arrange the branches of lilac in a scaldino on the
table near her. She is apparently so awkward about it that one odorous
white bough falls out on the floor. Before Jim can stoop to pick it up,
Byng has rushed to the rescue. In eagerly thanking him, in receiving it
back from him, and accepting his services in replacing it among its
perfumed brothers, the girl, perhaps involuntarily, turns her back upon
her former interlocutor, who sits for a moment staring rather blankly at
her, and wondering what sting there could have lurked in his apparently
harmless words to drive her away so abruptly. Whatever may have driven
her away, there is certainly no doubt as to her being gone. Nor as Jim
sees her moving about the room, followed by Byng, and showing him her
treasures--the little wild red and yellow tulips she plucked in the
field this morning; the chicken-skin box she bought at Ciampolini's
yesterday, and mixing all that she shows with her delicate light
laughter--can he buoy himself up with any reasonable hope of her ever,
with her own good will, returning. He must be looking more blank than he
is conscious of, for Mrs. Le Marchant's voice sounds quite apologetic in
his ears, when, having been, like himself, deserted by her companion,
she takes a seat near him.
"Elizabeth is so proud of her bargains," she says, glancing with a
lenient smile towards her daughter; "she must show them to everybody."
"She never offered to show them to me," replies Jim, rather morosely;
then, becoming aware of the almost puerile jealousy evidenced by his
last remark, he adds:
"I am afraid I said something that annoyed Miss Le Marchant; I cannot
think what it could have been. I told her how wonderfully little changed
I thought her in the last ten years; but it could not have been that,
could it?"
The mother's eye is still following her child, and, if it were not an
absurd assumption, Burgoyne could have fancied that there was a sudden
moisture in it.
"She is very sensitive," Mrs. Le Marchant answers slowly; "perhaps it
would be safer not to say anything about herself to her."
"Perhaps it would be safer," rejoins Jim, with some ill-humour, "if you
were to draw up a list of subjects for me to avoid; I have no wish to
play the part of bull in a china shop; and yet I seem to be always doing
it; imprimis" (striking the forefinger of his left hand with the right),
"imprimis the Moat."
He pauses, as if expecting a disclaimer, but none such comes--"The past
generally" (moving on to the second finger and again halting; but with
no more result than before). "Yourselves" (reaching the third finger).
Still that silence, which, if it mean anything, must mean assent. He
looks impatiently in her face, to seek the response which her lips
refuse him.
"On your own showing," she says gently, though in a rather troubled
voice, "you have the whole field of the present and the future left you;
are not they wide enough for you?"
His brows draw together into a painful frown.
"Perhaps I have as little cause to be fond of them as you have of the
past."
It is a random shot, a bow drawn at a venture; but it could not have hit
more true apparently had it been levelled with the nicest aim.
As her daughter had done before her, Mrs. Le Marchant rises hastily, and
leaves him--leaves him to reflect ironically upon how wisely Amelia had
acted in insisting upon his visiting these "dear old friends," upon whom
the effect of his conversation is so obviously exhilarating.
"I wish I had not come; I wish it was time to go home!"
The small fractious voice that wails the two preceding sentences seems
to be Jim's own mouthpiece. It is, in point of fact, the voice of
Bertie, who, tired of uttering his unregarded request for the repetition
of the concert which had filled him with such delight, has of late been
trying the effect of his unassisted powers to bring about the desired
consummation, by putting his arms as far as he can round the dog's body,
and endeavouring to lug him towards the music-stool. The collie has been
enduring this treatment for five minutes--enduring it with an expression
of magnanimous patience, which seems to say, that, though it is
undoubtedly an unpleasant experience, yet, as it is inflicted upon him
by one of his own family, he must of course put up with it, when
Elizabeth goes to the rescue. Elizabeth goes alone, since Byng is held
in converse by her mother at the other side of the room. Verbal
persuasions having entirely failed, she tries to loosen the child's
arms; but his grasp, though puny, is obstinate, and the only perceptible
result of her endeavours is the utterance by her young friend of the two
polite aspirations above recorded.
"He does not want to sing any more to-day," Jim hears her saying in her
gentle voice; "you really are hurting him; he is too polite to say so;
but you are squeezing him so tight that you really _are_ hurting him.
Why now" (with a little accent of pain), "you are hurting _me_."
Jim has been looking with a lack-lustre eye out of the open window at
the young plane trees exchanging their frowsy buds for infant leaves; at
the one Judas tree pranking in its purple blossoms in the Piazza; but at
that low complaint he makes one step across the room, and, whipping off
Master Bertie alike from long-enduring dog and plaintive woman, stoops
over the latter as she sits upon the floor, passing one hand over the
other, upon which the child's angry fingers, transferred from his first
victim, have left rosy prints of pain.
"I wish I had not come; I wish it was time to go home!" whimpers the
little boy.
"Since he is so anxious to go home, I will take him, if you like," says
Jim in a stiff voice; "I must be going myself."
She looks up at him from her lowly posture, a charming, half-apologetic,
wholly peace-making smile fleeting across her small face, while she
still chafes her hand--that little pinched hand which makes him feel so
ridiculously tender.
"Are you, too, sorry that you came?" she asks.
The question takes him by surprise. He is not prepared for so friendly
and almost intimate a sequel to her short, shy answers, and her abrupt
quitting of him. He hesitates how to answer it; and as he hesitates, she
rises and stands beside him. It is not easy for a grown person to rise
gracefully from a seat on the floor. Jim catches himself thinking with
what a roll and a flounder Cecilia would have executed the same
manoeuvre; but Elizabeth, supple and light, rises as smoothly as an
exhalation from a summer meadow.
"If I was rude to you just now," she says, rather tremulously; "if I am
ever rude to you in the future, I hope you will understand--I hope you
will put it down to the fact that I--I--am very ignorant of--that I know
very little of the world."
* * * * *
The two men are gone; so is the child; so is the dog; and Elizabeth is
shutting up the piano and removing the score.
"What a noise we made!" she says, smiling at the recollection.
"If you make such a shocking noise again, the signora and the other
lodgers will infallibly interfere."
Mrs. Le Marchant has followed her daughter, and now throws one arm about
her slight neck, with a gesture of passionate affection.
"If you knew," she says, in a voice of deep and happy agitation, "what
it was to me to hear you laugh as you did to-day!"
"I have a good many arrears in that way to make up, have not I, mammy?
And so have you too," answers the younger woman, laying her sleek head
down caressingly on her mother's shoulder; then, in a changed and
restless voice: "Oh, if we could stop that man talking about the Moat!
Why does he go on hammering about it?"
"Why indeed?" replies Mrs. Le Marchant with a shrug. "Men are so
thick-skinned; but it is rather touching, his having remembered us all
these years, is not it? For my part, I had almost entirely forgotten his
existence--had not you?"
"Absolutely!" replies Elizabeth, with emphasis; "and if he will only let
me, I am more than willing to forget it over again. Oh, mammy" (turning
her face round, and burying it on her mother's breast), "why can't we
forget everything? begin everything afresh from now--this delightful
_now_?"