CAMILLE.--"Que me conseilleriez-vous de faire le jour ou je
verrais que vous ne m'aimez plus?"
There is no greater fiction than that for time to go quickly implies
that it must needs go pleasantly. Jim has seldom spent a more
disagreeable period than the hours which follow his conversation with
Byng, and which he passes in his own bedroom, with his elbows on the
window-ledge, looking blankly out at the Piazza, and at the great
"Bride" of Arnolpho's planning, the church of Santa Maria Novella. And
yet, when the city clocks, which have chimed unnoticed by him several
times, at length convey to his inattentive ear what the hour is, he
starts up, shocked and confused at its lateness. He had meant to have
reached the Villa Schiavone in time to receive Amelia, and now she must
have long preceded him, and be attributing his tardiness to some fresh
neglect and indifference. In five minutes he has rearranged his dress,
and jumped into a fiacre. Through the Porta Romana, and up between the
straight row of still and inky cypresses, up and up to where the villa
door, promising so little and performing so much, opens as so many do,
straight upon the road.
The day has changed its ravishing blue gaiety for a pensive cloudy
gloom, and the guests at the villa are walking about without any
sunshades. They are numerous, though few indeed in comparison of the
Banksia roses on the laden wall, over which, too, a great wistaria--put
in, as the host with a just pride relates, only last year--is hanging
and flinging its lilac abundance. And seen above its clusters, and above
the wall, what a view from this raised terrace! Jim is really in a hurry
to find Amelia, and yet he cannot choose but stop to look at it--from
Galileo's tower on the right, to where, far down the plain of the Arno,
Carrara loses itself in mist. It is all dark at first, sullen,
purple-gray, without variation or stir--city, Duomo, Arno, Fiesole, and
all her chain of sister-hills--one universal frown over every slope and
jag, over street and spire, over Campanile with its marbles, and Santa
Croce with its dead. But now, as it draws on towards sun-setting, in the
western sky there comes a beginning of light, a faint pale tint at
first, but quickly broadening across the firmament, while the whole huge
cloud canopy is drawn aside like a curtain, and, as a great bright eye
from under bent brows, the lowering sun sends arrows of radiance over
plain, and river, and city. All of a sudden there is a vertical rain of
dazzling white rays on the plain, and the olive shadows, merged all the
afternoon in the universal gray, fall long and soft upon the blinding
green of the young corn. He has forgotten Amelia. Oh, that that other,
that creature herself made out of sun-rays and sweet rain-drops, were
beside him, her pulses beating, as they so surely would, to his tune,
her whole tender being quivering with delicate joy at this heavenly
spectacle.
Someone touches him on the shoulder, and he starts violently. Has the
intensity of his invocation called her spirit out of her light body, and
is she indeed beside him?
"What a bad conscience you must have! Did you think that I was a
bailiff?" cries Mrs. Byng, laughing.
"Where is Amelia?" he asks, rather curtly, the memory of Byng's
communication about his mother being too fresh in his mind to make it
possible for him to answer her in her own rallying key. "What have you
done with Amelia?"
"What a 'Stand-and-deliver' tone!" says she, laughing still, but looking
not unnaturally surprised. "Well, where is she?" glancing round. "She
was here five minutes ago with Willy. Poor Amelia!" lowering her voice
to a more confidential key. "I am so glad you have come at last; she is
patience personified. I must congratulate you upon the excellent
training into which you have got her, but I think that she was beginning
to look a little anxious."
"And _I_ think that you have been giving the reins to your imagination,
as usual," replies he, walking off in a huff.
There is another delightful garden at the back of the villa, and there,
having failed to find her in the first, he now with growing irritation
at her for not being more immediately conspicuous, seeks Amelia. It is a
sheltered leisurely paradise, where white rose-trees, with millions of
bursting buds, are careering over the walls in leafy luxuriance, where
double wallflowers--bloody warriors, one should call them, if one could
connect any warlike idea with this Eden of scented peace--stocks in
fragrant row are flowering as we Britons never see them flower in our
chary isle, save in the plates of a Gardeners' Chronicle. But among them
he finds no trace of his homely English blossom. He finds, indeed, him
who had been named as her late companion, Byng; but it is not with
Amelia, but with one of the pretty young daughters of the house that he
is pacing the straight walk in lively dialogue. Jim accosts him
formally:
"I understood that Miss Wilson was with you? Do you happen to know where
she is?"
Byng stops short in his leisurely pacing.
"Why, where is she?" he says, looking round, as his mother had done, but
with a more guilty air. "She was here five minutes ago. Where can she
have disappeared to?"
It is but too obvious that in greeting and being greeted by their
numerous acquaintances, both poor Amelia's chaperon and that chaperon's
son have completely forgotten her existence. Always nervously afraid of
being burdensome, Jim feels convinced from what he knows of her
character that she is going about in unobtrusive forlornness, the
extreme smallness of her Florentine acquaintances making it unlikely
that she has found anyone to supply the place of the friends who have
become so entirely oblivious of her. The conviction, pricking his
conscience as he hastens contritely away from the vainly-repentant Byng,
lends speed and keenness to his search. But thorough and earnest as it
is, it is for some time quite unsuccessful. She makes one of no group,
she loiters under no Banksia rose-bower, she is no gazer from the
terrace at gold-misted valley or aureoled town, she is to be found
neither in hidden nook, nor evident path. She is not beneath the loggia,
she is nowhere out-of-doors. She must then, in her loneliness, have
taken refuge in the house. He finds himself in a long, noble room, with
a frescoed ceiling, a room full of signs of recent habitation and recent
tea, but which has apparently been deserted for the sunset splendours on
the terrace. He can see no single occupant. He walks slowly down it to
assure himself of the fact of its entire emptiness.
By a singular and unaccountable freak of the builders, the windows are
set so high in the wall that each has had to have a little raised dais
erected before it to enable the inmates to look comfortably out. Upon
each small platform stands a chair or two, and low over them the
curtains sweep. As he passes one recess, he notices that the drapery is
stirring a little, and examining more closely, sees the tail of a
well-known gown--of that gown which has met with his nearest approach to
approval among Amelia's rather scanty stock--peeping from beneath the
stiff rich folds of the old Italian brocade. It is the work of a second
to sweep the latter aside, and discover his poor _fiancee_ all alone,
and crouching desolately in a low arm-chair. There is something so
unlike her in the attitude, something so different from her usual
uncomplaining, unpretending fortitude, something so disproportioned to
the cause--his own careless but not criminal delay, as he supposes--in
the despair evidenced by her whole pose, that he feels at once terrified
and angry. In a second he, too, has stepped up on to the little platform
beside her.
"Amelia!" he cries. "Amelia! What are you doing up here? With whom are
you playing hide-and-seek?"
Her words and her smiles are apt to be prompt enough, Heaven knows, to
spring out, answering his least hint; but now she neither speaks nor
moves a muscle of her face. She scarcely starts at all at his sudden
apparition and address, and no light comes across her features--those
features which, now that he looks at them more closely, he sees to be
set in a much more pinched pallor than even three watching nights and a
week of airless worry can account for.
"Are you ill?"
"No; I am not ill."
The sting of irritation which, mixed with genuine alarm, had besieged
Jim's mind on his first realizing her crouched and unnatural attitude,
now entirely supersedes any other feeling. Is the accidental delay of
half an hour, an hour, say even an hour and a half, enough to justify
such a parade of anguish as this?
"Is it possible," he inquires, in a tone of cold displeasure, "that I am
to attribute this--this state of things--to my being accidentally late?
It was a mere accident: it is not like you to make a scene. I do not
recognise you; I am very sorry that I was late, and that I have made you
angry."
The chill reproach of his words seems to rouse her to a state more akin
to her natural one, to the humble and unexacting one which is habitual
to her.
"Angry!" she repeats: "angry with you for being late? Oh, you are quite
mistaken! In all these years how often have I been angry with you?"
There is such a meek upbraiding in her tone that his ill-humour gives
way to a vague apprehension.
"Then what is it?" he cries brusquely; "what is it all about? I think I
have a right to ask you that; since I saw you last something must have
happened to you to produce this extraordinary change."
She heaves a long dragging sigh.
"Something has happened to me; yes, something has happened!"
"But what--what kind of a something? I have a right to know--I insist
upon knowing; tell me!"
He has grasped both her hands, whose unnatural coldness he feels even
through her rather ill-fitting gloves. So strange and mean a thing is
human nature that even at this moment it flashes across him, with a
sense of annoyance, what bad gloves Amelia always wears. However, he is
not troubled with them long, for she takes them and her cold hands
quietly back.
"I will tell you, there is no question of insisting. I should have told
you anyhow; but not _here_"--glancing nervously round the dropped
curtains--"not now!"
"Why not here? Why not now?"
Her face quivers.
"I could not," she says piteously. "I do not quite know how I shall get
through telling it; it must be somewhere--somewhere where it will not
matter if I do break down!"
He stares at her in an unfeigned bewilderment, again slightly streaked
with wrath.
"Have you gone mad, Amelia? or are you taking a leaf out of Sybilla's
book? If you do not clear up this extraordinary mystification at once, I
shall be compelled to believe either the one or the other."
Again her face contracts with pain.
"Oh, if it were only a mystification!" she says, with a low cry. "I
cannot tell you here; it is physically impossible to me. But do not be
afraid"--with an accent of bitterness, which he is quite at a loss to
account for--"you shall not have long to wait; I will tell you, without
fail, to-morrow; to-morrow morning, if you like. Come as early as you
please, I shall be ready to tell you; and now would you mind leaving me?
I want to have a few moments to myself before I see anybody--before I
see Mrs. Byng; will you please leave me?"
It is so apparent that she is in deadly earnest, and resolute to have
her request complied with, that he can do nothing but step dizzily down
off the little dais, feeling as if the world were turning round with
him.
A quarter of an hour later he sees her leaving the party with Mrs. Byng,
looking as simple, as collected, and not very perceptibly paler than
usual.