A reconciliation is seldom effected without some price being paid for
it. Jim's with Elizabeth, if it can be called such, is bought at the
cost of a small sacrifice of principle on his part. No later than this
morning he had laid it down as a Median rule that he should avoid
opportunities of finding himself in Miss Le Marchant's company; and yet,
not only has he spent the major part of the afternoon in her society,
but, as he walks away from her door, he finds that he has engaged
himself to help Byng, on no distant day, in doing the honours of the
Certosa Monastery to her and her mother. On reflection, he cannot quite
explain to himself how the arrangement has come about. The proposal
certainly did not originate with him, and still less with the two ladies
so strangely shy of all society. The three have somehow been swept into
it by Byng, who, either with the noblest altruism, or because he feels
justly confident that he has no cause for jealousy of his friend (Jim's
cynical reflection is that the latter is the much more probable reason),
has insisted on drawing him into the project.
Jim Burgoyne is not a man whom, as a rule, it is easy either to wile or
cudgel into any course that does not recommend itself to his own
judgment or taste--a fact of which he himself is perfectly aware, and
which makes him remorsefully acknowledge that there must indeed have
been a traitor in the citadel of his own heart before he could have so
weakly yielded at the first push to what his reason sincerely
disapproves. But yet it is not true that remorse is the leading feature
of his thoughts, as he walks silently beside his friend down the Via di
Servi. It ought to be, perhaps; but it is not. The picture that holds
the foreground of his memory is that of Elizabeth sitting on the floor,
and sending him peace-offerings from her pathetic eyes and across her
sensitive lips. It was very sweet of her to think it necessary to make
him amends at all for her trifling incivility, and nothing could be
sweeter than the manner of it. How gladly would he buy some little
rudeness from her every day at such a price! But yet, as he thinks it
over, the manner of it, the ground on which she rested her excuse, is
surely a strange one. That she should attribute her light lapse from
courtesy to want of knowledge of the world comes strangely from the
mouth of a woman of six-and-twenty. If it be true--and there was a naive
veracity in lip and eye as she spoke--how is it to be accounted for? Has
her mind, has her experience of life, remained absolutely stationary
during the last ten years? Her tell-tale face, over which some pensive
story is so plainly written, forbids the inference. It is no business of
his, of course. Amelia, thank Heaven! has no story; but, oh! if someone
would tell him what that history is! And yet, three days later, he
voluntarily puts away from himself the opportunity of hearing it.
During those three days he sees no more of her. He does not again seek
her out, and accident does not throw her in his way. He buys his
Cantagalli dinner-service in company with Amelia; chooses the
soup-tureen out of which he is to ladle mutton broth for the inhabitants
of Westbourne Grove; he tastes of the wedding-cake that has cost Cecilia
so dear, and he avoids Byng. On the third day he can no longer avoid
him, since he is to occupy, as on the San Miniato occasion, the fourth
seat in the fiacre which conveys himself and the Misses Wilson to the
garden-party at the villa in Bellosguardo inhabited by Mrs. Roche, the
mother of the amiable Bertie. The Wilsons' acquaintances in Florence are
few, and, as far as Burgoyne has at present had the opportunity of
judging, evil. It is, therefore, with a proportionate elation that
Cecilia dresses for a party at which she will meet the bulk, or at least
the cream, of the English society. It is to Byng's good nature that she
and her sister owe the introduction to a hostess whose acquaintance is
already too large to make her eager for any causeless addition to it;
but whose hand has been forced by Byng, in the mistaken idea that he is
doing a service to his friend Jim.
They are late in setting off, as Amelia is delayed by the necessity of
soothing Sybilla, who has been reduced to bitter tears by a
_tete-a-tete_ with her father, in which that well-intentioned but
incautious gentleman has been betrayed into suggesting to her that she
may possibly be suffering from biliousness. The administering of
bromide, to calm her nerves under such a shock; the reiterated
assurances that every member of the family except its head realizes the
monstrosity of the suggestion, take up so much time that Amelia herself
has to reduce to a minimum the moments allotted to her own toilette. She
has cried a little with Sybilla, for company partly, and partly out of
weariness of spirit. That and hurry have swollen her eyelids, and
painted her cheeks with a hard, tired red, so that it is an even more
homespun figure and a homelier face than usual, that seat themselves
opposite Burgoyne, when at length they get under weigh.
He, Burgoyne, has been impatient of the delay, impatient to set off and
to arrive; yet he would be puzzled to say why. He knows, on no less
authority than her own word, that he shall not meet Elizabeth; and yet
the mere feeling that the mistress of the house to which he is going is
of the same blood as she; that he shall see the rude, spoilt child,
whose ill-tempered pinch made her utter that low cry of pain, suffice to
give a tartness to his tone, as he inquires the cause of her lagging, of
the panting, flushed, apologetic Amelia. Byng and Cecilia have been
sitting waiting for some time in the _salon_, from which Sybilla has
removed her prostrate figure and tear-stained face; but they have been
entertaining each other so well--she in paying him a series of marked
attentions, and he in civilly and pleasantly accepting them--that the
half-hour has not seemed long to either. But the party, in motion at
last, has passed the Roman Gate, and is climbing up and up between the
high walls, each step giving it a greater vantage ground over the Flower
City, before Burgoyne recovers his equanimity.
The spring comes on apace. In the gardens above their heads laurestinus
bushes, with all their flowers out (as they are never seen in England,
where always the east wind nips half the little round buds before they
can expand into blossom), stand in white and green; rosemary trees,
covered with gray bloom, hang down; and against the azure of the high
heaven purple irides stand up arow. It is one of those days on which one
can with bodily eyes see the Great Mother at her quickening work; can
see her flushing the apple-boughs, unfolding the fig-leaves, and driving
the lusty green blood through the sappy vines. And in the slow creeping
of the fiacre up the twisting white road, each turn lays the divine
Tuscan city before them in some new aspect of arresting loveliness.
At Florence, one is like Balaam with the Israelites. One is taken to see
her from one point after another, each point seeming fairer than the
last; but the likeness ends there, for no wish to curse the sweet town
could ever arise in even the morosest heart. The hills have put on their
summer look of dreamy warmth and distance. Before they have reached the
hilltop the boon Italian air has kissed most of the creases out of Jim's
temper, and the brick-red from Amelia's cheek-bones. He looks
remorsefully from the triumphant beauty around, into the poor, fond face
opposite to him--looks at her with a sort of compassion for being so
unlovely, mixed with a compunctious admiration and tenderness for her
gentle qualities. He may touch her hand without fear of observation, so
wholly is Byng enveloped in the mantle of Cecilia's voluble tenderness.
"Have you forgiven me?" he asks, smiling; "I will make any apologies,
eat any dirt, say anything, short of allowing that Sybilla is not
bilious."
They have reached the villa, and turned out of the dusty highway into a
great cool courtyard, that has a Moorish look, with its high arches,
over which the Banksia roses tumble in cascades of yellow and white. It
seems wrong that the voices which come from the tea-tables under the
Loggia should be chattering English or Yankee, instead of cooing that
"sweet bastard Latin" that better suits place and day.
The hostess shakes hands absently with Burgoyne, offers his fair charges
iced coffee, and then, having discharged her conscience towards them,
draws Byng away for an intimate chat. From her hands he passes into
those of several other willing matrons and maids, and it seems likely
that the party who brought him will see him no more. Amelia, unused to,
and unexpectant of attention, is perfectly content to sit silent,
sipping her cold coffee; but Cecilia is champing her bit in a way which
frightens her future brother-in-law so much that he cowardly takes the
opportunity of her looking in another direction to lure his docile
_fiancee_ on to the broad terrace, whence all the young green glory of
the Arno's plain, and the empurpled slopes and dreamful breast of
Morello, are to be seen by the looker's beauty-drunk eye. Upon this
terrace many people are walking and sitting in twos and threes, and in
one of the little groups Amelia presently discovers a female
acquaintance, who at once fastens upon her, and happening to be
afflicted with a relative visited by a disorder of something the same
nature as Sybilla's, subjects her to a searching and exhaustive
catechism as to the nature of her sister's symptoms. Sybilla's symptoms,
whether at first or second hand, have invariably the property of driving
Jim into desert places; and, in the present instance, seeing no
likelihood of an end to the relation of them, he turns impatiently away,
and, without much thought of where he is going, follows a steep downward
path that ends in a descent of old stone steps, between whose crevices
green plants and little hawkweed blow-balls flourish undisturbed, to a
large square well, framed by a low broad parapet, with flower-beds set
around it, and the whole closed in by rugged stone walls. No one
apparently has had the same impulse as he, for, at first, he has the
cool solitude to himself. He sits down on the parapet of the still well,
and drops in pebbles to see how deep the water is; and anon lifts his
idle look to the empty niches in the crumbling wall--niches where once
wood-god, or water-nymph, or rural Pan stood in stone, now empty and
forsaken. Out of the wall two ilexes grow, and lift themselves against
the sapphire arch, which yet is no sapphire, nor of any name that
belongs to cold stone; a blue by which all other blues are but feeble
colourless ghosts of that divinest tint.
He is roused from the vague reverie into which the cool silence and the
brooding beauty around have lulled him, by the sound of approaching
voices. He is not to have his well any longer to himself. He looks up
with that scarcely latent hostility in his eye with which one regards
the sudden intruder into a railway carriage, when--counting on keeping
it to one's self for a long night journey--one has diffused limbs and
parcels over its whole area. The owners of the voices, having descended,
as he had done, the age-worn steps, come into sight. They are both men,
and one of them he recognises at once as a Mr. Greenock, a well-known
stock figure in Florentine society, a mature bachelor diner-out, a not
ill-natured retailer of news, collector of _bons-mots_, and harmless
appendage of pretty women. Of the other, at whom he scarcely glances,
all he grasps is the fact that he is dressed in clerical attire, and
that the first words audible of his speech, as he comes within hearing,
is the name of an English county--Devonshire. The answer comes in a tone
of keen interest:
"Ah, I thought there must be a screw loose!"
As the new arrivals become aware of the presence of a third person, they
pause in their talk; but presently, Mr. Greenock having recognised Jim
and greeted him with a friendly nod and a trivial remark upon the
splendour of the day, they resume their interrupted theme, standing
together a few yards distant from him on the walk--resume it in a rather
lower but still perfectly audible key.
"I thought there must be some reason for their shutting themselves up so
resolutely," continues Mr. Greenock in the gratified tone of one who has
at length solved a long-puzzling riddle. "I thought that there must be a
screw loose, in fact; but are you quite sure of it?"
The other gives a sigh and a shrug.
"Unfortunately there can be no doubt on that head; the whole lamentable
occurrence took place under my own eyes; the Moat is in my parish."
"Devonshire!" "A screw loose!" "The Moat!" Burgoyne is still sitting on
the well-brim; but he no longer sees the lapis vault above, nor the
placid dark water below. A sort of horrible mist is swimming before his
eyes; it is of Elizabeth Le Marchant that they are speaking. Through
that mist he snatches a scared look at the speaker; at him whom but two
minutes ago he had glanced at with such a cursory carelessness. Does he
recognise him? Alas! yes. Though changed by the acquisition of a bald
head and a grizzled beard, he sees him at once to be the man who, at the
time of his own acquaintance with the Le Marchant family, had filled the
office of vicar of their parish; under whom he had sat on several drowsy
summer Sunday mornings, trembling at the boys' perilous antics in the
great curtained pew, and laughing inwardly at Elizabeth's
mirth-struggling efforts to control them.
"And you say that they never held up their heads again afterwards?"
pursues Mr. Greenock in a tone of good-natured compassion, that is yet
largely tinged with gratified curiosity.
"They left the neighbourhood at once," returns the clergyman. "Dear me,
how time flies! it must be ten years ago now, and I never saw them again
until I met the unhappy girl and her mother yesterday, driving in the
Via Tornabuoni; but"--lowering his voice a little more--"you will
understand that this is strictly _entre nous_; that it must not go any
further."
"What do you think I am made of?" cries Mr. Greenock in a burst of
generous indignation; "but"--stepping a pace or two nearer to his
interlocutor--"I am not quite sure that I have got the details of the
story right; would you mind just running it over to me again?"
Jim has been sitting in such a stunned stillness that it is perhaps no
wonder that they have forgotten his neighbourhood. At all events, the
clergyman is evidently about to comply with his companion's request and
recapitulate the tale. If Jim preserves his motionless attitude but five
minutes longer, he will be put into possession of that story whose
existence he has already heavily conjectured, and the imagining of which
has made him often, within the last week or two, turn with nausea from
his food, and toss restlessly upon his bed. Without any trouble on his
part, without any possible blame attaching to him, he will learn the
poor soul's secret. Never! If the devil wish to tempt him with a
prospect of success, it must be with a less unhandsome bait. Almost
before the two startled scandalmongers have recalled the fact of his
existence by the abrupt noise of his departure, he is half-way back to
the terrace, that mist still before his eyes, and a singing in his ears.