There are few things more difficult than when one's mind is full of the
interests, cares, and sorrows of one set of friends, to have to empty it
suddenly of them, and refill it as suddenly with the entirely different,
and perhaps discrepant interests, cares, and sorrows of an altogether
alien set.
Seldom in the course of their old and tried friendship has Jim Burgoyne
felt less disposed for the company and conversation of his valued ally,
Mrs. Byng, than when he knocks at the door of her sitting-room on the
morning following the excursion to Certosa. He cannot talk to her about
the Le Marchants, seeing that she has never even heard of their
existence; and if out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh,
his talk upon any other topic must be scant and jejune indeed. The only
cheerful side which his prospective visit turns to him is, that if he
were not with Mrs. Byng, he would be with Amelia; and that the
friendlily indifferent eyes of the former will, at all events, be less
likely than the hungrily loving ones of the latter to detect that he has
not slept a wink, and that he has not the remotest idea what he is
talking about. If he were to follow his inclination, he would be
bestowing his company this morning upon neither friend nor sweetheart,
but would be ransacking Florence for the piece of information he had
yesterday promised those two woebegone women to procure for them. Even
into the very midst of his heartfelt sore compassion for them, there
pierces a shamed unwilling flash of elation at the thought of what a
stride to intimacy his being entrusted with this commission implies, of
what an opening to indefinitely numerous future visits it affords. His
determination to conduct the search is at present a good deal more
clearly defined than the method in which that search is to be effected.
He can consult _Galignani_ as to the names and whereabouts of new
arrivals; but they could do that much for themselves. He could examine
the visitors' books of the different hotels; but Florence, though a
little city, is rich in hostelries, and this course would take time. He
could consult Mr. Greenock, the head and fount of all Florentine gossip,
and who, since he had seen him in conversation with the object of his
inquiries, would probably be able to satisfy them; but his acquaintance
with the good-natured newsmonger is not sufficiently intimate for him to
be able to pay him a morning visit with any air of probability of having
been impelled thereto by a desire for his company; and, moreover, he
shrinks with a morbid fear from any action which may lead, however
obliquely, to his being himself apprised of the terrible secret
which--it is no longer mere matter of conjecture--lies couched somewhere
in those two poor creatures' past.
And meanwhile he knocks at Mrs. Byng's door, and is quickly bidden enter
by a cheerful English voice, the welcoming alacrity of whose tones
shames his own want of pleasure in the meeting. But he is too
unfortunately honest to express a joy he does not experience, and only
says, with a slight accent of reproach as he takes her ready hand,
heartily held out:
"You should not spring these surprises upon us."
She laughs a little guiltily.
"It--it was a sudden thought; you see I--I had never seen Perugia."
He laughs too. "Poor Perugia! I think it would have blushed unseen for a
good many more years if you had not begun to doubt the efficiency of my
chaperonage. Confess! you have come to look after the precious baby-boy,
have not you?"
His tone is, as he himself feels, not quite a pleasant one; but the
mother is scarcely more prone to take offence than the son; and she
answers with an amiably hasty disclaimer:
"It was not that I felt the least want of confidence in you--you must
not think that; but--but I had one of my presentiments! you know that I
am always a little superstitious; and three nights running an owl came
and hooted quite close under my window!"
"As long as I have known your wood, it has had owls; and as long as I
have known them, they have hooted."
"In the wood, yes, of course, and I like to hear them; but this one was
close under my window."
Jim's only answer is to lift his hands and shoulders in protest against
his friend's weak-mindedness.
"I had quite made up my mind that something had happened," continues
she, not much abashed by his scorn; "and it was the greatest relief when
I first caught sight of him at the station yesterday, looking just as
usual, a little thinner perhaps--does not he strike you as a little
thin? Has he been weighed lately? He gives me the idea of having lost a
pound or two since I last saw him. Is there a weighing-machine in the
hotel?"
"It will be very easy to ascertain."
"And how is Amelia?"--her cheerful eyes resting in friendly and
half-inquisitive interest on his sombre face.
"Amelia is very well, thank you."
"Amelia Wilson still?"
"Yes."
"For how long?"--laughing--"another ten years, I suppose?"
"For three months, I believe; we are to be married as soon as they
return to England."
"You do not say so?"--with an accent of lively and delighted
incredulity--"hurrah! poor Amelia! '_Tout vient a point a qui sait
attendre_;' and she has _su attendre_ with a vengeance, has not she?"
"She is not going to _attendre_ any more," replies Jim dryly.
"Then I shall have to give you a present, I suppose!" cries Mrs. Byng,
still with that delighted accent. "Something useful, I have no doubt. I
feel sure that Amelia would like something useful; why should not we
choose it to-day? Florence is an ideal place for buying presents; do you
think that Amelia would spare you to me for a whole morning?"
Jim hesitates. It is not that he has any doubt as to Amelia's cheerful
renunciation of any portion of his time that he may see fit to abstract
from her; but the occupation suggested--that of squiring Mrs. Byng--is
not that to which he had purposed devoting his forenoon. She sees his
unreadiness to answer, and attributes it to a wrong cause.
"Amelia will not?" cries she in a tone of surprise and disappointment.
"Well, I could not have believed it of her! Not even if you told her
that it is on purpose to buy her a present?"
Jim breaks into an unavoidable smile. "How frightfully quickly your mind
moves! It leaps like a kangaroo! I never said that she would not resign
the precious boon of my society; on the contrary, I am sure that nothing
would give her greater pleasure, but--but--what will Willy say to my
monopolizing you?"
At the excessive disingenuousness of this speech his conscience gives
him a severe prick, recalling to his mind the attitude of prostrate
affliction--stretched face downwards on his bed--in which his young
friend had received the news of his parent's prospective approach. A
light cloud passes over that parent's sunny face.
"Willy has an engagement this morning," she answers more slowly, and
with less radiance than has hitherto marked her utterances; "nothing
could be sweeter and dearer than he was, and he is going to take me
somewhere this afternoon--to Fiesole or Petraia, or somewhere else
delightful; but this morning he has an engagement. He did not tell me
what it was, and I did not like to tease him with questions. You"--with
a rather wistful glance of interrogation at her companion--"do not
happen to know what it is?"
Jim shakes his head, while a rather deeper shade than habitually lies
upon it settles on his careworn forehead. It is perfectly true that he
knows nothing of young Byng's engagement, but yet he has a shrewd
suspicion to what quarter of the town that engagement will lead him.
"So that I rather counted upon you," continues Mrs. Byng, turning with a
somewhat crestfallen air to the window.
"And you did not count in vain," replies Burgoyne, with a sort of forced
gallantry. It has flashed upon him that he will have to consent under
penalty of giving a detailed account of the reasons for his inability,
and that therefore he had better make a virtue of necessity, and do it
with a good grace. After all, the deferring for a couple of hours of his
researches cannot be of any great consequence to the persons in whose
behalf those researches are set on foot. To a suspicious ear there might
be something dubious in the sudden and galvanized alacrity of his
assent; but not a shadow of doubt crosses Mrs. Byng's mind as to her old
and tried ally being as pleased to avail himself of an opportunity for
enjoying her society as he has always showed himself during the twenty
years and more of their acquaintance.
Protected by this happy misconception, she sets off, all smiles, though
at the outset of the expedition she finds that she has to modify her
project; and that Burgoyne shows himself restive as to _bric-a-brac_
shops, and declines peremptorily to be any party to buying himself a
wedding present. He puts his objection upon the semi-jocose ground that
he shall be unable to avoid overhearing the price of her intended gift,
and that his modesty could not stand the strain of helping her to haggle
over it. Perhaps, however, deep in his heart is an unconscious feeling
that to receive nuptial offerings gives an almost greater body and
certainty to his on-striding fate than even the buying of
dinner-services and saucepans. So they go to the Accademia delle Belli
Arti instead, it having occurred to Jim that in a picture-gallery there
will be less opportunity for conversation, less opening for interested
inquiries on his companion's part as to Amelia and the minutiae of his
future life with her, than there would be in the green walks of the
Cascine, or on the slopes of Fiesole.
To Mrs. Byng, who is of almost as enjoying a nature as her son, and
whose spirits have been raised to a pitch even higher than their usual
one, by the disproof of her presentiments, it is all one where she goes,
so that she is taken somewhere, to see something. They stare up at the
big young David, and stand before Fra Angelico's ineffably happy
Paradiso, which yet brings the tears to the looker's eyes, perhaps out
of sheer envy of the little blissful saints dancing and frolicking so
gaily, or pacing so softly in the assured joy of the heavenly country.
They look at Botticelli's "Spring," fantastic wanton, with her
wildly-flowered gown, and her lapful of roses. The room in which she and
her joyous mates stand, with their odd smiles, is one of the smaller of
the gallery. It is rather a narrow one, and has an open window, giving
upon a little court, where, in a neglected garden-close, wallflowers are
growing, and sending in their familiar perfume. The sweet Francia saints
in the picture hung on the wall directly opposite, and the rapt Madonna,
must surely smell them. If they do not, it must be because a young
couple, he and she, who are leaning out in their eagerness to enjoy it,
have intercepted all the homely fragrance. Jim's eyes are still on the
"Spring," and he is thinking half absently how little kinship she has
with the goitred green women, whom his nineteenth-century disciples
present to the confiding British public as representatives of Sandro
Botticelli's manner, when his attention is diverted by hearing the voice
of Mrs. Byng at his elbow addressing him in an excited tone:
"Why, there's Willy! Do not you see? There! leaning out of that window,
and who--who is the lady whom he has with him?"
Jim looks quickly in the direction indicated, and at once recognises a
slender gray figure which to-day has not assumed its white holiday gown.
Elizabeth, whom he had been pitifully picturing lying heart-struck on a
sofa in the seclusion of her own little _entresol_, probably with
lowered blinds and tear-smarting eyes, is leaning on the window-ledge
with her back to the pictures--she whom he had always credited with so
delicate a sensibility for Art, with her back to the pictures, as if the
live picture which Byng's eager face presents to her pleases her better.
A sense of indignation at having been tricked out of his compassion--who
had ever seemed to need it less than the suave little figure about whose
blonde head a Tuscan sunbeam, stolen through the easement, is amorously
playing?--makes him forget to answer the question addressed to him,
until it is repeated in a still more urgent key.
"Who _is_ she? Who _can_ she be? Have not you an idea? He has not seen
us! Had not we better creep quietly away? Most likely he would rather
not meet me; I could not bear to make him look foolish!"
The suggestion that there can be anything calculated to put Willy to the
blush in being discovered in conversation with Miss Le Marchant has the
effect of giving Burgoyne rapidly back his power of speech.
"What nonsense!" he cries almost rudely; "I wish you would not let your
imagination run away with you so, and of course I know who she is; she
is an--an acquaintance of mine. I--I presented Willy to her; she is Miss
Le Marchant."
"Miss Le Who?" repeats the mother eagerly, catching the name
imperfectly, as we usually do a name that is unfamiliar to us, proving
how much of imagination and memory must go to eke out all our
hearing--"an acquaintance of yours, is she? Oh, then, of course"
(drawing a long breath of relief), "she is all right."
"All right!" echoes Jim, with an unconscious snappishness of tone,
greater than he would have employed in defence of the reputation of any
other lady of his acquaintance, probably because, ever since the day
when he stood an unwilling eaves-dropper by that well on Bellosguardo, a
hideous low voice has been whispering to his own sick heart that perhaps
she is not "all right!" "All right! of course she is all right."
"But she is lovely!" cries Mrs. Byng, not paying much heed to the testy
emphasis of her companion's asseveration, and continuing to stare at the
unwitting girl; "what a dear little face! but," the alarm returning
again into her voice, "is it possible that she is here alone with him?
If so, of course she is American. Oh! do not say that she is American."
"Of course she is not," answers Burgoyne, half laughing at the plaintive
intensity of this last appeal; "of course she is all that there is of
most English, and there is her mother, as large as life, within a yard
and a half of her; there, do not you see? looking at the Ghirlandajo."
Mrs. Byng removes her eyes from the daughter, and fixes them with a
scarcely less degree of interest upon the then indicated parent.
"So that is the mother, is it? a very nice-looking woman, and what
beautiful white hair! Mrs. Le----what did you say their name was? Ah!
Willy has seen us, poor boy!"--laughing--"how guilty he looks! here he
comes!"
And in point of fact the young man, having given a very indubitable
start and said something hurried to his companion, is seen advancing
quasi-carelessly to meet the two persons, the object of whose
observation he has for some minutes so unconsciously been.
"Is not this a coincidence?" cries Mrs. Byng, with a rather
nervously-playful accent; "it _is_ a coincidence, though it may not look
like one! But do not be afraid; we know our places, we are not going to
offer to join you!"
"What should I be afraid of?" replies the young man, the colour--always
as ready as a school miss's to put him to shame--mantling in his
handsome smooth cheeks. "I am like the Spanish hidalgo, who never knew
what fear was till he snuffed a candle with his fingers. So you and Jim
are having a happy day among the pictures. Do not you like 'Spring'? I
love her, though I am sure she was a real baggage!"
But this ingenious attempt to divert the current of his parents' ideas
into another channel is scarcely so successful as it deserves.
"Will not you introduce me to her?" she asks eagerly, and not heeding,
evidently not even hearing, the empty question contained in the last
half of his speech; "does she know that I am your mother? Will not you
introduce me to her?"
It seems a simple and natural request enough, and yet the young man
perceptibly hesitates. He even tries to turn it off by a clumsy and
entirely pointless jest.
"Introduce you to her? to whom? to 'Spring'? I am really afraid that my
acquaintance with her scarcely justifies such a liberty!"
A look of surprise and of natural annoyance clouds the cheerful
eagerness of Mrs. Byng's face.
"Is that a joke, dear?" she asks, with a rather vexed smile; "it is not
a very good one, is it? Well, Jim, I must apply to you then; _you_ can
have no objection to presenting me to your friends?"
"Of course not, of course not," replies he, with a stammering
unreadiness, which contrasts somewhat ludicrously with the acquiescence
conveyed by his words, "I shall be delighted, only----"
"Only what? Ah, here they come! they save us the trouble of going after
them."
As she speaks, indeed, Mrs. Le Marchant and Elizabeth are seen nearing
the little group; but it is soon apparent that this movement on their
part is by no means owing to any wish or even willingness to make Mrs.
Byng's acquaintance. It is indeed solely due to there being no egress
from the room at that end of it where they have been standing, so that,
if they wish to leave it, they must necessarily retrace their steps and
pass the three persons who are so busily discussing them. They do this
so quickly and with so resolute an air of not wishing to be delayed in
their exit, bestowing a couple of such smileless and formal bows upon
the two men, that it would have needed a much more determined
obstruction than either of those gentlemen is prepared to offer to
arrest their progress. In a moment they are through the doorway and out
of sight. Mrs. Byng looks after them, with her mouth open.
"They--they--are obliged to go home, they--they are in a great hurry!"
says the younger man, observing the displeased astonishment expressed by
his mother's countenance, and with a lame effort at explanation.
"So they seemed when first we caught sight of them," retorts she dryly.
"They--they are not going out at all at present, they--they do not wish
to make any fresh acquaintance: oh, by-the-bye, I forgot something I had
to say to--I will be back in a moment!"
So saying, he shoots off in pursuit of the retreated figures, and Mrs.
Byng and her escort are again left _tete-a-tete_.
"Are you quite sure that she is all right?" asks the lady, looking at
Jim with a penetrating glance that he does not enjoy; "because, if so,
why was she so determined not to know me?"
"How can I tell?" answers he testily. "Perhaps--who knows?"--laughing
unmirthfully--"perhaps she was not sure that _you_ were all right!"