"Ihr Blumen alle, Heraus! Heraus!"
It was to German flowers that the above hest was addressed. If they obey
it, with how much more alacrity do the Italian ones comply with its glad
command. It is a week later, and now no one can say that "the spring
comes slowly up this way." Vines, figs, and mulberries, all are
emulously racing out, and the corn has added two emerald inches to its
juicy blades. The young plane-trees in the Piazza d'Azeglio, so skimpily
robed when first Jim had rung the _entresol_ bell of No. 12, are
exchanging their "unhandsome thrift" for an apparel of plenteous green,
and a wonderful Paulownia is beginning to hold up her clusters of
gloccinia bells.
Jim has watched the daily progress of the plane-leaves from the low
window of No. 12's _entresol_. The daily progress? Is it possible that
he has been there every day during the past week? He asks himself this,
with a species of shock; and it is with a sense of relief that he finds
that one whole day has intervened, during which he had not heard the
sound of the electric bell thrilling through the apartment under the
touch of his own fingers. What can have taken him there, every day but
one? He runs over, in his mind, with a misgiving as to their
insufficiency, the reasons of his visit. For the first he had had an
excellent excuse. Surely it would have been barbarous not to have
imparted to the anxiously-watching pair the good news that the object of
their mysterious terror had really and authentically gone! On the second
day it seemed quite worth while to take the walk, in order to tell them
that he had accidentally learned the clergyman's destination to be
Venice, and his intention to return _via_ Milan and the St. Gothard. On
the third day, being as near to them as San Annunziata, it had seemed
unfriendly not to inquire after Mrs. Le Marchant's neuralgia. On the
fourth----He is pulled up short in his reminiscences. Why had he gone on
the fourth day? He can give no answer to the question, and slides off
from it to another. Which was the fourth day? Was it--yes, it was the
one on which the wind blew as coldly east as it might have done across
Salisbury Plain's naked expanse, and he had found Elizabeth sitting on a
milking-stool shivering over a poor little fire of green wood, and
blowing it with a pair of bellows. He had helped her to blow, and
between them they had blown the fire entirely away, as often happens in
the case of unskilled handlers of bellows, and Elizabeth had laughed
till she cried.
And meanwhile, how many times has he been within the portals of the
Anglo-Americain? With all his arithmetic he cannot make it more than
twice. This neglect of his betrothed, however, is not of quite so
monstrous a cast as at the first blush it may appear. It is she herself
who, true to her life-long principle of shielding him from all
disagreeable experiences, has forbidden him her door. He can aid her
neither to bandage her father's swollen foot in the severe gout-fit
under which he is groaning, nor to allay Sybilla's mysterious
sufferings, which always display a marked increase in acuteness whenever
any other member of the family shows a disposition to set up claims as
an invalid. Cecilia, indeed, is ready enough to give her help in nursing
her father, but she has on former occasions shown such an unhappy
aptitude for tumbling over his swathed and extended leg, and upsetting
his physic all over him, that she is received with such objurgations as
his cloth will permit, so often as she shows her short nose within his
sick-room. Only twice in a whole week. Can Amelia have wished to be
taken quite so literally when she had bidden him stay away? There is
only one answer possible to this question, and he shows his
consciousness of it by at once raising himself out of the chair in which
he is sunk, and turning his steps hastily towards her.
It is morning. The east wind is clean gone, and the streets are full of
the scent of the innumerable lilies of the valley, of which everybody's
hands are full. He stops a minute and buys a great sheaf for a
miraculously small sum, from one of the unnumbered sellers. It shall
make his peace for him, if indeed it needs making, which it has never
done yet. He almost smiles at the absurdity of the suggestion. He finds
Cecilia alone in the sitting-room, Cecilia sitting by the window reading
the _Queen_. Upon her large pink face there is a puzzled expression,
which is perhaps to be accounted for by the fact that the portion of the
journal which she is perusing is that entitled "Etiquette," and under it
are the answers to last week's questions, upon nice points of social
law, which, if you do not happen to have read the questions, have
undoubtedly an enigmatical air, as in the following instances: "Your
husband takes the Baronet's daughter, and you follow with the
Prince."--"We do not understand your question--babies never dine out,"
etc.
Upon Jim's entrance Cecilia lays down her paper, and at once offers to
go in search of her sister, with whom she shortly returns. He had been
quite right. There is no peace to make. Amelia greets him with her usual
patient and perfectly unrancorous smile, but his second glance at her
tells him that she is looking old and fagged. It is only in very early
youth that vigils and worries and self-denials do not write their names
upon the skin.
"How--how pale you are!" he says. If he had given utterance to the word
that hovered on his lips, he would have cried, "how yellow!"
"It would be very odd if she did not," says Cecilia with a shrug,
looking up from her "Etiquette," to which she has returned; "she has sat
up three nights with father, and last evening Sybilla bid us all
good-bye. You know she never can bear anybody else to be ill, and when
father has the gout she bids us all good-bye--and Amelia is always taken
in and sheds torrents of tears--do not you, Amelia?"
Amelia has subsided rather wearily into a chair. "She really thinks that
she is dying," says she apologetically--"and who knows? some day perhaps
it may come true."
"Not it," rejoins her sister, with an exasperated sniff "she will see us
all out--will not she, Jim?"
"I have not the remotest doubt of it," replies he heartily; and then his
conscience-struck eyes revert to his betrothed's wan face, all the
plainer for its wanness. "No sleep, no fresh air," in an injured tone,
checking off the items on his fingers.
"But I have had fresh air," smiling at him with pale affection; "one day
Mrs. Byng took me out for a drive. Mrs. Byng has been very kind to me."
She does not lay the faintest invidious accent on the name, as if
contrasting it with another whose owner had been so far less kind; it is
his own guilty heart that supplies the emphasis. His only resource is an
anger which--so curiously perverse is human nature--is not even feigned.
"You can go out driving with Mrs. Byng then, though you could not spare
time to come out with me," he says in a surly voice.
She does not defend herself but her lower lip trembles.
"Come out with me now," he cries, remorse giving a harshness even to the
tone of the sincerely-meant invitation. "You look like a geranium in a
cellar; it is a divine day, a day to make the old feel young, and the
young immortal; come out and stay out with me all day. I will take you
wherever you like. I will----"
The genuine eagerness of his proposal has tinged her sickly-coloured
cheek with a healthier hue for the moment, but she shakes her head.
"I could not leave father this morning; he will not take his medicine
from anyone else, and he likes me to sit with him while he eats his
arrowroot."
The only sign of approval of this instance of filial piety given by Jim
is that he rises and begins to stamp irritably about the room.
"He is really not at all exacting," continues Amelia in anxious
deprecation; "he was quite pleased just now when I told him that Mrs.
Byng was going to take me to a party at the Villa Schiavone this
afternoon. He said----"
"Mrs. Byng! Mrs. Byng again!"
This is not what Mr. Wilson said, but is the expression of the unjust
wrath which Burgoyne, feeling it much pleasanter to be angry with
someone else than himself is artificially and not unsuccessfully
fostering. Again Amelia's lip quivers.
"I thought," she says gently, "if--if you have no other engagement this
afternoon; if--if you are free----"
Nothing can be milder than the form which this suggestion takes, and yet
there is something in its shape that provokes him.
"Free!" he interrupts tartly, "of course I am free! Have I a gouty
father and a hysteric sister? Why should not I be free?"
"I am very glad to hear it," rejoins she--the light that his first
proposal to take her out had brought into her face growing brighter and
more established--"because in that case there is nothing to prevent your
meeting us at the villa, and----"
"And seeing you and Mrs. Byng walking about with your arms round each
other's necks, like a couple of schoolgirls," cries he, with a sort of
spurious grumpiness.
"I can't think why you should object to Amelia walking about with her
arm round _Mrs._ Byng's neck," says Cecilia, whose attention to her
"Etiquette" is apparently not so absorbing but that she has some to
spare for the conversation going on in her neighbourhood.
They all laugh a little; and harmony being restored, and Jim graciously
vouchsafing to forgive Amelia for having ignored her for a sennight, she
returns to her patient, and he to his hotel, where he is at once,
contrary to his wish, pounced upon by Byng.
For some reason, which he would be puzzled to explain to himself, he has
for the last week rather avoided his friend's company--a task rendered
easier by the disposition manifested by the young man's mother to
monopolize him, a disposition to which Burgoyne has felt no inclination
to run counter. It is without enthusiasm that he receives Byng's
expressions of pleasure in their accidental meeting.
"I have been searching for you, high and low."
"Have you?"
"Where have you been?"
"I have been to the Anglo-Americain"--with a flash of inward
self-congratulation at this query having been put to-day, instead of
yesterday, or the day before. The other looks disappointed.
"To the Anglo-Americain? I thought--I hoped; have you--seen _them_
lately?"
Burgoyne has ceased to feign lack of understanding to whom the personal
pronoun refers, and he answers with as much carelessness as at a
moment's notice he can put on: "Why, yes, I have, once or twice."
"Do they--do not they think it strange of me not to have been near them
all this time?"
"They may do"--dryly.
"They did not say so?"
"They did not; perhaps"--sarcastically--"the subject was too acutely
painful for them to allude to."
Frequently as he has exposed himself to them, his Mentor's sneers never
fail to send the crimson racing into Byng's face, and it finds its way
there now. It does not, however, prevent his proceeding, after a
confused moment or two, with his anxious catechism.
"She--she has not referred to the subject?"
"What subject?"
"To--to me?"
"She has never mentioned your name. Stay"--his veracity winning a
reluctant victory over his ill-nature--"one day she said that you were
sunshiny, and that she liked sunshine."
As he speaks he looks down at his boots, too unaffectedly annoyed at the
justification of Elizabeth's epithet which its retailing has worked on
Byng's countenance to be able to contemplate him with any decent
patience. But there is enough evidence in the boy's voice of the effect
wrought upon him by Miss Le Marchant's adjective to make his comrade
repent very heartily of having repeated it.
"I should have been over," says Byng in a low eager way, "every day,
every hour, as often as they would have received me, only that I could
not leave my mother; and she--she has taken them _en grippe_!"
"_En grippe?_ Your mother?" repeats Jim, too honestly and disagreeably
startled by this piece of news to be able any longer to maintain his
ironical manner; "why?"
The other shrugs his shoulders dispiritedly.
"I have not an idea; it cannot be because they did not seem to wish to
be introduced to her at the Accademia the other day; she is quite
incapable of such pettiness, and she admired HER so tremendously at
first, did not she? You heard her; but since then she has taken it into
her head that there is something--I cannot bear even to say it"--dashing
his hat and gloves vehemently upon the table--"something _louche_, as
she calls it, about her. Mother thinks that she--she--she"--sinking his
voice to an indistinct half-whisper--"has--has gone off the rails some
time or other. Can you conceive?"--raising his tone again to one of the
acutest pain and indignation--"that anyone--any human being could look
in her face and harbour such a notion for a single instant?"
He stares with eyes ablaze with wrathful pity at his friend's face,
expecting an answering outbreak to his own; but none such comes.
Burgoyne only says, in a not much more assured key than that which the
young man had employed:
"How--how can such an idea have got into your mother's head?"
"I do not know, but it is there; and what I wanted you, what I have been
searching everywhere for you for, is to ask you to--to set her right, at
once, without any delay. It is unbearable that she should go on thinking
such things, and nothing could be easier for you, who know them so well,
who know all about them!"
Burgoyne is at first too much stupefied by this appeal, and by the
impossibility of answering it in a satisfactory manner, to make any
response at all; but at length:
"Know all about them?" he says, in a voice whose surface impatience
hides a much profounder feeling. "Who dares ever say that he knows all
about any other living soul? How many times must I tell you that, until
we met at Genoa, I had not set eyes on Miss Le Marchant for ten good
years?"
At the tone of this speech, so widely different from the eager
acceptance of the suggested task which he had expected, Byng's face
takes on a crestfallen, almost frightened look.
"But when you knew them," he says, "in Devonshire, they--they were all
right then, were not they? they were well thought of?--there was nothing
against them?"
"Good Heavens--no!" replies Jim heartily, thankful that the appeal is
now so worded as to enable him to give a warm testimony in favour of his
poor friends. "There was not a family in all the neighbourhood that
stood so high. Everybody loved them; everybody had a good word for
them."
Byng's countenance clears a little.
"And there is no reason--you have no reason for supposing anything
different now?"
Jim stirs uneasily in his chair. Can he truthfully give the same
convinced affirmative to this question as to the last? It is a second or
two before he answers it at all.
"The facts of life are enough for me; I do not trouble myself with its
suppositions."
He gets up and walks towards the door as he speaks, resolved to bring to
an end this to him intolerable catechism.
"But you must have an opinion--you must think," cries the other's voice,
persistently pursuing him. He turns at bay, with the door-handle in his
hand, his eyes lightening.
"I asked her permission to bring Amelia to see her," he says, in a low
moved voice; "if I had thought as ill of her as your mother does, do you
think I should have done that?"