There is always something in the nature of a mountain in a night that is
interposed between us and either any promised pleasure or any threatened
pain. In the case of pleasure, we are naturally in a hurry to scale it,
in order to see how full of sunshine and flowers is the happy valley on
the other side; and in the case of pain, we are all scarcely less eager
to ascertain how deep is the abyss, how choking the swamp, how angry the
waves that wait us beyond the dusty hill.
Burgoyne has no expectation of finding anything agreeable on the further
slope of his mountain, and yet the time seems long to him, till he has
climbed its crest, and slidden down its other side. Early and splendid
as is the new light that takes possession of him and his shutterless
bedroom, he upbraids it as a laggard; and the hours that pace by till
the one appointed for the explanation of yesterday's mystery seem to him
to hobble on crutches. What can Amelia have to say to him that needs
such a pomp of preparation? What can have turned Amelia into a Tragedy
Queen? What miracle can have made her take the imperative mood? For it
was the imperative mood unquestionably which, contrary to all precedent,
she had made use of when she had commanded him, most gently it is true,
since, being by her nature gentle, she can do nothing ungently, to leave
her. He absolutely laughs at the topsy-turviness of the idea. What can
she have to say that requires so carefully selected a spot to say it
in?--a spot where "it does not matter if she does break down." What, in
Heaven's name, can she be going to say that inspires her with such a
cold-blooded intention beforehand of breaking down?
Jim's state of mind is something that of the Baron's in "On ne badine
pas avec l'amour," on hearing that his daughter's governess had been
turning somersaults in a field of luzerne. "Non, en verite, non, mon
ami, je n'y comprends absolument rien. Tout cela me parait une conduite
desordonnee, il est vrai, mais sans motif comme sans excuse." If she
were any other woman, he should ascribe her behaviour to some tiresome
but passing tantrum, evoked by his delay in appearing? But in the past
eight years how many hundred times has he kept her waiting? and has she
ever failed to meet him with the same meek good-humour that has not had
even a tinge of reproachful forgiveness in it. As she herself had said,
"In all these years how often have I been angry with you?" He has been
angry with her times out of mind, angry with her on a thousand unjust
and unkind counts; angry with her for her slowness, her bad complexion,
her want of a sense of humour; for a hundred things that she cannot
help, that she would have altered--oh, how gladly!--if she could! But
how often has she been angry with him? In vain he searches his memory,
hoping to overtake some instance of ill-humour, or even pettishness,
that may make the balance between them hang a little more equal. But in
vain. She has never been angry with him. And even now neither her face
nor her manner--whatever else of strange and unparalleled they may have
conveyed--have conveyed the idea of anger.
But if not anger, what then can be the cause that has produced a change
so startling in one so little given to impulsive action or
eccentricities of emotion? Can she have heard anything about him?
anything to his discredit? He searches his conscience, but whether it be
that that organ is not a particularly sensitive one, or that it really
has no damaging facts to give up, it is silent, or almost so. He has
perhaps been rather slack in his attendance upon her of late, but at her
own bidding. At his visits to the Le Marchants' no one could take
exception, dictated as they so obviously have been by philanthropy, and
his conversations with Elizabeth--how few and scant! his heart heaves a
rebellious sigh at their paucity--might be proclaimed without excision
at the market cross. Our thoughts are our own, and are, moreover, so
safely padlocked in our minds that he does not think it worth while to
inquire whether, if his future wife could have looked in and seen the
restive fancies capering, saddleless and bridleless, there, she might
have been justified in assuming a crouching attitude and a sorrowfully
commanding manner.
He is as far as ever from solving the problem, when--for once in his
life before his time at the rendezvous--he presents himself at the
familiar door. It is opened to him by Amelia herself. She has often done
it before, seeming to know by instinct his ring from that of any other
person, but to-day the familiar action disconcerts him. He had expected
to be received with a formality and pomp of woe such as yesterday had
seemed to threaten; and here is Amelia looking exactly like her ordinary
self, except that she is perhaps rather more carefully dressed than
usual; but that may be due to the fact of her having, for the first
time, assumed the fresh calico gown, which the high summer of the
Italian April morning seems to justify. Whether it be due to the calico
gown or not, there is an indisputable air of gala about her, and she is
smiling. A revulsion of feeling comes over the man, to whom her tragic
semi-swooning airs had given a wakeful night. It was a tantrum after
all, then; a storm in a teacup. And now her common sense has come to the
rescue, and she has seen the folly of quarrelling with her bread and
butter. These reflections naturally do not translate themselves into
responsive smiles on his face, but she does not seem to notice his dour
looks.
"I have a proposal to make to you," she says, still smiling. "Father is
so well this morning, quite easy, and he has been wheeled into the
sitting-room to see Sybilla. She has been very good about him this time,
and quite believes that he has been really bad."
"How good of her!" comments Jim grimly; "it would be so easy and so
amusing to play at having a swollen toe, would not it?"
"And so," continues Miss Wilson, wisely ignoring his fleer at her
sister, "I am perfectly free, and I want you to take me somewhere, some
little drive or expedition; you see," with a conciliatory glance at her
own modest finery, "I counted upon your saying 'yes'; I dressed so as
not to keep you waiting."
Every word of this sentence confirms Burgoyne in the idea implanted by
her first address. This is her _amende_, and she is quite right to make
it. But she would have been more right still if her conduct had not
rendered it necessary.
Amelia is not the type of woman who through life will gain much by
pouts. Perhaps, by-and-by, very kindly and delicately, he may obliquely
hint this to her. But all that he says aloud is the rather stiff
acquiescence conveyed in the words:
"By all means. I am quite at your service."
"And now where shall we go?" continues Amelia, shutting the door behind
her and beginning to cross the hotel courtyard at his side; "that is the
next thing--not to any gallery or church, I think, if you do not mind; I
say such stupid things about Art, and the more I try, the stupider they
are; let us go somewhere into the country--I can understand the country.
I am not afraid of saying stupid things about it."
Into Burgoyne's mind comes the odious thought that he would not put it
past his betrothed to say stupid things even about the Tuscan landscape,
but he only awaits her decision in a respectful silence while helping
her into a fiacre.
"It would be a sin to be under any roof to-day but this one," she says,
looking up to the immeasurable azure bridge above her head; "would you
mind--could you spare time to go to Fiesole?"
His only answer is to repeat the word Fiesole to the driver, who, with
the inevitable tiny poodle-shaven dog beside him, is awaiting the order
as to his destination. It is but a little way to Fiesole, as we all
know, but yet, as the slow hired vehicle crawls up the steep ascent,
with the driver walking alongside, or even lagging behind, there would
be time and opportunity to say a good deal. But Amelia says next to
nothing. Perhaps the heat makes her sleepy, for it is so hot, so hot
between the garden walls, where the rose hedges are beginning to show a
pale flush of plenteous pink among their multitude of green buds. Young,
indeed, just born as the roses are, the highway dust has already
powdered them with its ash-toned white. He does not know it at the time,
but those dust-filmed rosebuds have found a home in his memory from
which no after-sights, however numerous, will dislodge them. They have
reached the village, and left their carriage, and begun, silently still,
to ascend the steep lane up which the feet of most of Europe and America
have in turn climbed to see the famous view that rewards the little
effort. Past the cottages, whose inmates, tranquilly sitting in their
doorways, or leaning idly against their door-posts, have probably seen
all that is illustrious, notorious, history-making of the day, pass
pantingly. Is there a prime minister, a princess, a poet, a prima donna,
of the time, that has not toiled up the steep path to the welcome rest
of the bench on the high plateau, on the hillside? Jim and Amelia are
certainly not likely to figure in the annals of their time, but the
peasants look at them with as much or as little interest as if they
were. An immortal, unless his immortality is printed on his back in
letters as large as those that announce Colman's mustard to the world,
has, to the vulgar, very much the air of one of themselves.
Our friends have reached the haven of the stone seat, and, thanks to the
earliness of the hour, have it all to themselves, save for a trio of
sunburnt women of the people, with handkerchiefs tied over their tanned
heads, who tease them to buy straw hand-screens. And when they have
bought a couple, and made it kindly but distinctly evident that no
amount of worrying will induce them to buy any more, even these leave
them in peace and descend the hill again, in search of newer victims.
They are alone under the sky's warm azure. Beneath their eyes spreads
one of those nobly lovely spectacles that Italy and spring, hand in
hand, alone can offer. To some, indeed, it may seem that the prospect
from the Bellosguardo side of the valley is even more beautiful, since
Fiesole, sitting so high as she does, dwarfs the opposite hills, and
makes the looker lose their wavy line. They seem flat in comparison, the
plain appears wider, the beloved city more distant, and does not show
the same exquisite distinctness of separate tower and spire and palace.
But yet such comparison is mere carping. Who can wish for a sight more
divinely suave and fair than this from the bench above Fiesole? Not a
breath of smoke dares to hang about the glorious old town, dimming its
lustre, and between them and it what a spread of manifold colour, of
more "mingled hue" than the rainbow's "purfled scarf doth show!" The
moon-tinted olives, twilight and ghostly, even in the dazzling radiance
of this superb morning hour, with the blinding green of the young corn
about their gray feet, the cypress taper-flames, the gay white houses,
terrace gardened, and, above all, the vast smile of the Tuscan heaven.
At first Amelia's muteness seems natural and grateful to Jim, as the
outcome of the awe and hush that exceeding beauty breathes on the human
heart, but by-and-by, as it is prolonged beyond the limits that seem to
him fit or agreeable, it begins to get on his nerves. After having so
genuinely and wantonly alarmed him, has she brought him here, without
any expressions of regret or remorse, simply to steep herself in a
silent luxury of selfish enjoyment? After brooding resentfully on this
idea for a considerable time, he translates it into speech.
"I thought that you had something to say to me?"
It seems as if her soul had gone out into the sun and April-painted
champaign country, and that it is only with an effort and a sigh that
she fetches it home again:
"So I have."
"And how much longer am I to wait for it?"
There is no indication of any capacity for patience in his tone.
She brings her look back from the shining morning city, and fixes it
wistfully upon him.
"Are you in such a hurry to hear?"
The pathetic streak in her voice, instead of conciliating, chafes him.
What is the sense of this paraphernalia of preliminaries? Why not come
to the point at once? if indeed there is a point--a fact of which he
begins to entertain grave doubts.
"I do not know what you call hurry," he replies drily; "I have been
awaiting this mystic utterance for sixteen or seventeen hours."
Her sallow cheek takes on a pinky tinge of mortification at his accent.
"You are quite right," she answers quickly; "I have no business to keep
you waiting. I meant to tell you as soon as we got here; I asked you to
bring me here on purpose, only----"
"You told me that you must make the communication at some place where it
would not matter if you did break down," says he, rather harshly helping
her memory; "you must allow that that was not an encouraging exordium.
Do you look upon this"--glancing ironically round--"as a particularly
suitable place for breaking down?"
Again that pain-evidencing wave of colour flows into her face. There is
such an unloving mockery in his displeased voice.
"I shall not break down," she replies, forcing herself to speak with
quiet composure; "you need not be afraid that I shall. I know that
yesterday I was foolish enough to say the very words you quote, but I
was not quite myself then; I did not quite know what I was saying; I had
only just heard it."
"_It?_ What IT? Is this a new riddle? For Heaven's sake let us hear the
answer to the first before we embark on any fresh one!"
"It is no riddle," replies she, her low patient tones contrasting with
his exasperated ones, "nothing could be plainer; it was only that I
happened to overhear something rather--rather painful--something that
was not intended for me."
His angry cheek blanches as his thought flies arrow-quick to the one
subject of his perennial apprehension. Someone has been poisoning her
ear with cowardly libels, or yet more dreadful truths about Elizabeth Le
Marchant. For a moment or two his tongue cleaves to the roof of his
mouth, then he says in a tone which he uselessly tries to make one of
calm contempt alone:
"If you had lived longer in Florence, you would know how much importance
to attach to its tittle-tattle and _cancans_."
She shakes her head with a sorrowful obstinacy.
"This was no tittle-tattle--no _cancan_."
Her answer seems but to confirm him in this first horrible suspicion.
"It is astonishing," he says, in a strangled voice, "how ready even the
best women are to believe evil; what--what evidence have you of the
truth of--of these precious stories?"
"What evidence?" she repeats, fastening her sad eyes upon him--"the
evidence of my own heart. I realize now that I have known it all along."
Read by the light of his fears, this response is so enigmatic that it
dawns upon him with a flash of inexpressible solace that perhaps he may
be on the wrong track after all. His ideas are precipitated into such a
state of confusion by this blessed possibility that he can only echo in
a stupefied tone:
"Have known what all along?"
She has turned round on the stone bench upon which they have hitherto
been sitting side by side, and, as he in the eagerness of his listening
has done the same thing, they are now opposite to one another, and he
feels as well as sees her hungry eyes devouring his face.
"That you are sick of me," she answers, in a heart-wrung whisper, "sick
to death of me--that was what she said."
It is impossible to deny that Burgoyne's first impulse is one of relief.
He has been mistaken, then. Elizabeth's secret is in the same state of
precarious safety as her enemy's departure from Florence had left it in.
His second impulse--our second impulses are mostly our best ones,
equally free from the headlongness of our first, and the cold worldly
wisdom of our third--is one of genuine indignation, concern, and
amazement.
"What who said?"
"Mrs. Byng."
His stupefaction deepens.
"_Mrs. Byng_--Mrs. Byng told you that I was sick of you? Sick to death
of you?"
"Oh, no," she cries, even her emotion giving way to her eagerness to
correct this misapprehension, "she did not tell _me_ so! How could you
imagine such a thing? She is far, far too kind-hearted; she would not
hurt a fly intentionally, and would be exceedingly pained if she thought
I had overheard her."
He shrugs his shoulders despairingly.
"_Je m'y perds!_ She told you, and she did not tell you; you heard, and
you did not hear."
"I am telling it very stupidly, I know," she says apologetically, "very
confusedly; and of course I can't expect you to understand by instinct
how it was." She sighs profoundly, and then goes on quickly, and no
longer looking at him. "You know she took me to the party, but when we
reached the villa, I found that she knew so many people, and I so few,
that I should only be a burden to her if I kept continually by her side,
and as I was rather tired--you know that I had not been in bed for two
or three nights--I thought I would go into the house and rest, so as to
be quite fresh by the time you came. I fancied it was not unlikely you
might be a little late."
His conscience, at the unintentional reproach of this patient
supposition, reminds him of its existence by a sharp prick. How many
times has her poor vanity suffered the bruise of being long first at the
rendezvous?
"I discovered that chair by the window under the curtain, the one where
you found me."
"Well?"
"It was so quiet there, as everybody was in the garden, that I suppose I
fell asleep; at least I remember nothing more until suddenly I heard
Mrs. Byng's voice saying----"
"Saying what?"
"Her son was with her--he had brought her in to have some tea; it was to
him that she was speaking; she was asking him about me, where I was?
where he had left me? whether he had seen me lately? And then she said,
'Poor Amelia, Jim really does neglect her shamefully; and yet one cannot
help being sorry for him, too; it was such child-stealing in the first
instance, and he is evidently dead-sick of her! It is so astonishing
that she does not see it!'"
There is something almost terrible in the calm distinctness with which
Amelia repeats the sentences that had laid the card-house of her
happiness in the dust. Certainly she keeps her promise to him to the
letter; she gives no lightest sign of breaking down. There is not a tear
in her eye, not a quiver in her voice. After a moment's pause, she
continues:
"And then he, Mr. Byng, answered, 'Poor soul, it--it _is_ odd! She must
have the hide of a hippopotamus.'"
Amelia has finished her narrative, repeating the young man's galling
comment, with the same composure as his mother's humiliatingly
compassionate ones; and for a space her sole auditor is absolutely
incapable of making any criticism upon it. He is forbidden, if he had
wished it, to offer her even the mute amends of a dumb endearment, by
the reappearance on the scene of a couple of the sun-scorched peasant
torments with their straw hand-screens. It is not likely that those so
lately bought should have worn out already; but yet they renew their
importunities with such a determined obstinacy, as if they knew this to
be the case; and it is not until they are lightened of two more, that
they consent once again to retire, leaving the warm bright plateau to
the lovers--if indeed they can be called such.