"Welcome ever smiles; and Farewell goes out sighing."
This last clause is not always true. For example, there is very little
sighing in the farewells made to Mrs. Byng by the two young men who see
her off at the Florence Railway Station. And Mrs. Byng herself has been
too much occupied in manoeuvring to get a few last private words with
each of her escort to have much time for sighing either.
She would have been wounded if her old friend Jim had not come to see
the last of her, and she would have been broken-hearted if her son had
not paid her this final attention; and yet each necessarily destroys the
_tete-a-tete_ she is burning to have with the other. It is indelicate to
implore your adored child not to go to the devil in the presence of an
intimate friend, and it would give a not unnatural umbrage to that child
if you urged the guardian friend to check his downward tendency while he
himself is standing by. Nor do her two companions at all aid her in her
strategy; rather, they show a tendency to unite in baffling her, hanging
together round her like a bodyguard, and effectually hindering the last
words which she is pining to administer. Only once for a very few
minutes does she succeed in outwitting them, when she despatches Willy
to the bookstall to buy papers for her--an errand from which he returns
with an exasperating celerity. The instant that his back is turned, Mrs.
Byng addresses her companion in an eager voice of hurry and prayer:
"You will keep an eye upon him?"
Silence.
"You will keep an eye upon him--promise?"
"I do not know what 'keeping an eye upon him' means in your vocabulary;
often you and I do not use the same dictionary; until I know, I will not
promise."
"You will look after him; _do_, Jim!"
"My dear madam"--with irritation--"let me go and buy your papers; and
meanwhile urge _him_ to look after _me_; I assure you that it is quite
as necessary."
"Fiddlesticks, with your unimaginative, unemotional nature----"
"H'm!"
"Your head will always take care of your heart."
"Will it?"
"While he--promise me at least that, if you see him rushing to his ruin,
you will telegraph to me?"
"Certainly, if you wish it; I will telegraph, 'Willy rushing Ruin.' At
five-and-twenty centimes a word, it will cost you sevenpence halfpenny;
not dear at the price, is it?"
The mother reddens.
"You have become a very _mauvais plaisant_ of late, Jim; oh dear me!
here he is back again, tiresome boy!"
It is with feelings tied into a knot of complications, which he scarcely
seeks to unravel, that Burgoyne walks away from the station, and from
the good-natured staunch woman, whose last few moments in fair Firenze
he has done his best to embitter. He is glad that she is gone, and he is
sorry that she is gone. He is remorseful at his gladness, and he is
ashamed of his sorrow, knowing and acknowledging that it results from no
regret for her companionship, which he had been wont to prize; but to
the consciousness that she had stood like an angel with a drawn sword
between her son and the Piazza d'Azeglio. Both angel and drawn sword are
steaming away now, covered by a handsome travelling cloak down to the
heels in a _coupe toilette_, and the road to the Piazza lies naked and
undefended, open to the light feet that are so buoyantly treading the
flags beside him.
The step of youth is always light, but there is something aggressively
springy in Byng's this morning; and though he does not _say_ anything
offensively cheerful, there is a ring in his voice that makes his kind
friend long to hit him. He, the kind friend, is thankful when their ways
part, without his having done him any bodily violence.
"You are late to-day," says Cecilia, as he enters the _salon_, giving
him a nod of indifferent friendliness, while Sybilla crossly asks him to
shut the door more quietly, and Amelia lays her hand lingeringly in his,
with a silent smile of rapture; "we began to think you had had a
relapse. I was just telling Amelia that the pace had been too good to
last--ha, ha!"
Burgoyne has always found it difficult to laugh at Cecilia's jokes, and
his now perfect intimacy with her relieves him from the necessity of
even feigning to do so.
"I have been seeing Mrs. Byng off," he replies, with that slight shade
of awkwardness in his tone which has accompanied his every mention of
the mother or son since his explanation with his betrothed.
"You let her go without getting that wedding present out of her, after
all?" cries Cecilia, who is in a rather tryingly playful mood.
"Gone, is she?" says Sybilla, with a somewhat ostentatious sigh of
resentful relief; "well, I, for one, shall not cry. I am afraid that she
was not very _simpatica_ to me; she was so dreadfully robust. Perhaps,
now that she is no longer here to monopolise him, we shall be allowed to
see something more of that nice boy."
No one answers. Not one of her three listeners is at the moment disposed
to chant or even echo praises of the "nice boy." Sybilla perversely
pursues the subject.
"I dare say that he has a delicacy about coming without a special
invitation," she says, "where there is an invalid; but you might tell
him that on my good days no one is more pleased to see their friends
than I; it does not even send my temperature up; you might tell him that
on my good days Dr. Coldstream says it does not even send my temperature
up!"
Again no one answers.
"You do not seem to be listening to what I am saying," cries Sybilla
fractiously; "will you please tell him, Jim?"
Jim lifts his heavy eyes from the ugly carpet on which they have been
resting, and looks distastefully back at her.
"I do not think that I will, Sybilla," he replies slowly; "I do not
think he cares a straw whether your temperature goes up or down. I think
that he does not come here because--because he has found metal more
attractive elsewhere."
He makes this statement for no other reason than because it is so
intensely unpleasant to him, because he realizes that he must have to
face the fact it embodies, and to present it not only to himself, but to
others. And each day that passes proves to him more and more
conclusively that it _is_ a fact. He asks Byng no question as to the
disposition of his day. He sees but little of him, having, indeed,
changed the hours of his own breakfast and dinner in order to avoid
having his appetite spoilt by the sight of so much unnecessary radiance
opposite him; but he knocks up against him, flower-laden, at the Strozzi
steps; he notes the splendour of his ties and waistcoats; he grows to
know the _Elizabeth-look_ on his face, when he comes singing home at
evening, as one knows the look of the western clouds that the sun's red
lips have only just ceased to kiss, though no sun is any longer in
sight; and yet he does not interfere. He has received from the young
man's mother a hasty letter, pencilled in the train, not an hour after
she had quitted him; another more leisurely, yet as anxious, from Turin;
a third from Paris, and lastly a telegram from Charing Cross. All bear
the same purport.
"Write; keep an eye upon him!" "Write; keep an eye upon him! Write!"
And yet, though a full week has passed, though he sees the son of his
old ally drifting, faster than ever autumn leaf drifted on a flush
October river, to the whirlpool she had dreaded for him, yet he sends
her never a word. He writes her long letters, it is true, covers
telegram-forms with pregnant messages, but they all find their ultimate
home in the wood fire. When the moment comes, he finds it impossible to
send them, since, upon searching his heart for the motives that have
dictated them, he finds those motives to be no fidelity to an ancient
friendship, no care for the boy's welfare, but, simply and nakedly, the
satisfaction of his own spite, the easing of his own bitter jealousy.
So the Florentine post goes out daily, bearing no tale of Byng's
backslidings to his native land, and Jim, brushing past him, answering
him curtly, never going nearer to the Piazza d'Azeglio than the
Innocenti--a good long street off--devotes himself to the frantic
prosecution of a suit long since won, to the conquest of a heart for
eight weary years hopelessly, irrecoverably, pitiably his. His presence
at the Anglo-Americain is so incessant, and his monopolizing of Amelia
so unreasonable, that Sybilla--for the first time in her life really a
little neglected--alternately runs up her pulse to 170 and drops it to
40.
"And then you wonder that I am anxious to be married," says Cecilia,
accompanying her future brother-in-law to the door, on the day on which
the latter phenomenon has occurred, and wiping the angry tears from her
plump cheeks. "I make no secret of it, I _am_ madly anxious, I would
marry anyone, I am desperate. Just think what my life will be when
Amelia is gone; and though of course I shall be a great deal with
her--she has promised that I shall be almost always with her" (Jim
winces)--"yet of course it can't be the same thing as having a home of
your own."
"We will do our best for you," replies he, with a rather rueful smile
and a sense of degradation; "but you know, my dear Cis, anybody can lead
a horse to the water, but it is not so easy to make him drink."
"That is quite true," replies Cecilia, one of whose most salient merits
is an extreme unreadiness to be affronted, wiping her eyes as she
speaks, "and I have no luck; such promising things turn up, and then
come to nothing. Now, that clergyman the other day, whom we met at the
Villa Careggi--such a pleasant gentlemanlike man--he was on the look-out
for a wife, he told me so himself, and I know so much about the working
of a parish, and next day he was off, Heaven knows where!"
Jim gives a slight shudder.
"I do not think you had any great loss in him," he says hastily; then,
seeing her surprised air, "I mean, you know, that it is always said that
a man is a better judge of another man than a woman is, and I did not
like his looks; give us time, and we will do better for you than that."
Cecilia can no longer accuse her future relation of any slackness in the
matter of expeditions. There is something of fever in the way in which
he arrives each morning, armed with some new plan for the day, giving no
one any peace until his project is carried out. It seems as if he must
crowd into the last fortnight of Amelia's stay in Florence all the
sight-seeing, all the junkets, all the enjoyment which ought to have
been temperately spread over the eight years of their engagement.
One day--all nearer excursions being exhausted--they drive to Monte
Senario, that sweet and silent spot, happily too far from Florence for
the swarm of tourists to invade, where earth-weary men have set up a
rest scarcely less dumb than the grave in a lonely monastery of the
Order of La Trappe. Through the Porta San Gallo, along the Bologna Road
they go. It is a soft summer morning, with not much sun. Up, past the
villas and gardens, where the Banksia roses and wistarias are rioting
over wall, and berceau and pergola, climbing even the tall trees. Round
the very head of one young poplar two rose-trees--a yellow and a white
one--are flinging their arms; flowered so lavishly that hardly a pin's
point could be put between the blossoms. Up and up, a white wall on
either hand. The dust lies a foot thick on the road; thick too on the
monthly roses, just breaking into full pink flush; thick on themselves
as the endless mulecarts come jingling down the hill with bells and red
tassels, and a general air of what would be jollity were not that
feeling so given the lie to by the poor jaded, suffering beasts. Up and
up, till they leave stone walls and villas and oliveyards behind them,
and are away among the mountains. At a very humble little house that has
no air of an inn they leave the carriage, and climb up a rocky road, and
through a perfumed pine-wood, to where the Trappist Monastery stands, in
its perfect silence and isolation, on its hilltop, looking over its
fir-woods at the ranges of the Apennines, lying one behind the other in
the stillness of the summer-day; looking to distant Florence, misty and
indistinct in her Arno plain; looking to Fiesole, dwarfed to a
molehill's dimensions.
"I am told that one of the brothers is an Englishman; I did not hear his
name, but he is certainly English," says Cecilia, as they mount the
shallow, grass-grown steps to the monastery door. "If I send up word
that I am a fellow-countrywoman, perhaps he will come out and speak to
me; I am sure that it would be a very nice change for him, poor fellow!"
And it is the measure of the amount of Cecilia's acquaintance with the
rules of the Order, that it is only half in jest that she makes the
suggestion. But she does not repeat it to the lay-brother who stands,
civil yet prohibitory, at the top of the flight, and who, in answer to
Burgoyne's halting questions as to where they may go, politely answers
that they may go anywhere--anywhere, _bien entendu_, outside. So they
wander aimlessly away. They push open a rickety gate, and passing an old
dog, barking angry remonstrances at them from the retirement of a
barrel, step along a grassy path that leads they know not whither. Two
more young lay-brothers meet them, with their hands full of
leopard's-bane flowers, which they have been gathering, probably to deck
their altar with.
Amelia has passed her hand through Jim's arm--since his late increased
kindness to her she has been led to many more little freedoms with him
than she had hitherto permitted herself--and though she is very careful
not to lean heavily or troublesomely upon him, yet the slight contact of
her fingers keeps him reminded that she is there. Perhaps it is as well,
since to-day he is conscious of such a strange tendency to forget
everything, past, present, and to come. Has one of the monks' numb hands
been laid upon his heart to lull it into so frozen a quiet? To-day he
feels as if it were absolutely impossible to him to experience either
pleasure or pain; as if to hold Elizabeth in his own arms, or see her in
Byng's, would be to him equally indifferent. His apathy in this latter
respect is to be put to the test sooner than he expects. Not indeed that
Elizabeth is lying in Byng's arms--it would be a gross misrepresentation
to say so, she being, on the contrary, most decorously poised on a
camp-stool--least romantic of human resting places--when they come
suddenly upon her and him in the course of their prowl round the
inhospitable walls. She is sitting on her camp-stool, and he is lying on
his face in the grass, just not touching her slim feet.
The advancing party perceive the couple advanced upon before the latter
are aware of their nearness; long enough for the former to realize how
very much _de trop_ they will be, yet not long enough to enable them to
escape unnoticed. Jim becomes aware of the very second at which Amelia
recognises the unconscious pair, by an involuntary pinch of her fingers
upon his arm, which a moment later she hastily drops. His own first
feeling on catching sight of them--no, not his _very_ first--his very
first is as if someone had run a darning-needle into his heart--but
almost his first is to shout out to them in loud warning:
"Be on your guard! we are close to you!"
He will never forgive either himself or them if they ignorantly indulge
in any endearment under his very eyes. But they do not. There are no
interlacing arms to disentwine, nothing to make them spring apart, when
at length they look up and take in the fact--an unwelcome fact it must
needs be--of their invasion.
On hearing approaching footsteps, Byng rolls over on his back in the
grass; on perceiving that most of the footsteps are those of ladies, he
springs to his feet. Elizabeth remains sitting on her camp-stool.
"What a coincidence!" cries Cecilia, breaking into a laugh.
They are all grateful to her for the remark, though it is rather a silly
one, as there is no particular coincidence in the case. Burgoyne is
irritatedly conscious that Amelia is covertly observing him, and before
he can check himself he has thrown over his shoulder at her one of those
snubbing glances from which, for the last ten days, he has painstakenly
and remorsefully refrained. It is not a happy moment to look at poor
Amelia, as she has not yet cooled down from the heat of her climb
through the fir-wood--a heat that translates itself into patchy flushes
all over her face, not sparing even her forehead. Elizabeth is flushed
too. She has not met Miss Wilson since she had declined Burgoyne's offer
of bringing his betrothed to see her, and in her deprecating eyes there
is a guilty and tremulous recollection of this fact. But below the guilt
and the deprecation and the tremor, what else is there in Elizabeth's
eyes? What of splendid and startling, and that comes but once in a
lifetime? Rather than be obliged to give a name to that vague radiance,
Jim turns his look back upon his own too glowing dear one.
"Did you come here all alone? You two all alone? What fun!" asks
Cecilia, with an air of delighted curiosity.
Again her companions inwardly thank her. It is the question that
both--though with different degrees of eagerness--have been thirsting to
ask.
"Alone?--oh no!" replies Elizabeth, with that uneasy, frightened look
that Burgoyne has always noticed on her face when she has been brought
into unwilling relation with strangers. "My mother is here--she came
with us; why, where is she?"--looking round with a startled air--"she
was here a moment ago."
A grim smile curves Jim's mouth. It is evident that the unhappy Mrs. Le
Marchant, worn out with her _role_ of duenna, has slipped away without
being missed by either of her companions. Would they have even
discovered her absence but for Cecilia's query?
"Mrs. Le Marchant was here a moment ago," echoes Byng, addressing the
company generally; "but"--dodging his friend's eyes--"she said she was a
little stiff from sitting so long; she must be quite close by."
"I will go and look for her," says Elizabeth, confused, and rising from
her rickety seat as she speaks; but Amelia, who is nearest to her, puts
out a friendly hand in prohibition.
"Oh, do not stir!" she cries, smiling kindly and admiringly. "You look
so comfortable. Let _me_ go and search for Mrs. Le Marchant;
I--I--should be afraid to sit down, I am so hot. I should like to find
her; Cecilia will help me, and Mr. Byng will show us the way."
It is not always that generous actions meet their meed of gratitude from
those for whose sake they are performed; and, though Burgoyne recognises
the magnanimity of his _fiancee's_ line of conduct, thankfulness to her
for it is not the feeling uppermost in his mind when, a few moments
later, he finds himself standing in uneasy _tete-a-tete_ over the seated
Elizabeth.
"Will not you sit down?" she asks presently, adding, with a low, timid
laugh, "I do not know why I should invite you, as if"--glancing round at
the sun-steeped panorama--"this were my drawing-room."
He complies, taking care to occupy a quite different six feet of herbage
from that which still bears the imprint of Byng's lengthy limbs. The
grass grows cool and fresh, full of buttercups and tall blue bugle; out
of them the gray monastery wall rises, in its utter lifeless silence,
with its small barred windows. Was ever any building, within which is
human life, so unutterably still? As he leans his elbow among the
king-cups, Jim says to himself that the lovers had chosen their place
well and wisely--that the consciousness of the austere, denied lives
going on so close behind them, in their entire joylessness, must have
given an added point, a keener edge to the poignancy of their own
enjoyment of the sweet summer day outside.
"You have not been to see us for a long time," says Elizabeth presently,
in a small and diffident voice, after having waited until the
probability of his speaking first has become a mere possibility, and
even that a faint one.
He replies baldly, "No."
His look is fixed on a knoll, whence the monks must have gathered their
leopard's bane. They cannot have gathered much, so bounteously do the
gay yellow flowers still wave on the hillock. Nearer stands a colony of
purple orchises, and from them the eye travels away to the silent
fir-wood, to the range of misty hills and the distant plain, touched now
and again by a vague hint of sunshine, that makes one for the moment
feel sure that one has detected Duomo or Campanile. How many hill ranges
there are! One can count six or seven, like the ridges in a gigantic
ploughed field, one behind another--all solemnly beautiful on this
windless day of grave and ungaudy sweetness. Has the young man been
reckoning the ranks of the Apennines, that it is so long before he adds
a low-voiced, mocking question to his monosyllable?
"Have you missed me very much?"
The woman addressed seems in no hurry to answer. She has drawn her
narrow brown brows together, as if in the effort to hit truth in her
nicest shade in her answer. Then she speaks with a sort of soft
self-remonstrance:
"Oh, surely! I _must_ have missed you--you were so extraordinarily, so
unaccountably kind to us!"
There is not one of us who would not rather be loved for what we _are_
than for what we _do_; so it is perhaps no wonder if the young woman's
reply strikes with an unreasonable chill upon the asker's heart.
"You must have been very little used to kindness all your life," he
says, with some brusqueness, "to be so disproportionately grateful for
my trumpery civilities."
She hesitates a moment, then:
"You are right," she replies; "I have not received any great kindness in
my life--justice, well, yes, I suppose so--but no, not very much mercy."
Her candid and composed admission of a need for mercy whets yet farther
that pained curiosity which has always been one of the strongest
elements in his uncomfortable interest in her. But the very sharpness of
that interest makes him shy away awkwardly from the subject of her past.
"I always think," he says, "that there is something fatuous in a man's
apologizing to a lady for not having been to see her, as if the loss
were hers, and not his."
"Is there? All the same, I am sorry that you did not come."
This simple and unsophisticated implication of a liking for him would
have warmed again the uneasy heart that her former speech had chilled
had not he, under the superficial though genuine regret of her face,
seen, still shining with steady lustre, that radiance which has as
little been called forth by, as it can be dimmed by him or anything
relating to him. And so he passes by in silence the expression of that
sorrow which he bitterly knows to be so supportable.
The still spirit of the day seems to have touched the very birds. They
sing a few low notes in veiled, chastened voices from the fir-wood, and
again are silent. The clock tells the hours in quarters to the doomed
lives inside the monastery, self-doomed to suffering and penance and
incarceration, even with the winning blue of the Tuscan sky above their
tonsured heads, with the forget-me-nots pressing their feet, and the
nightingales singing endless love-songs to them from the little dark
forest nigh at hand.
"I suppose," says Elizabeth presently, in a reflective tone, "that the
fact is, when people are in your position--I mean on the brink of a
great deep happiness--they forget all lesser things?"
He snatches a hasty glance of suspicion at her. Is this her revenge for
his neglect of her? But nothing can look more innocent or less ironical
than her small profile, bent towards the gigantic forget-me-nots and the
pulmonaria, azure as gentians.
"Perhaps."
"The big fish"--her little face breaking into one of her lovely smiles,
which, by a turn of her head from side to full, she offers in its
completeness to his gaze--"swallows up all the little gudgeons! Poor
little gudgeons."
"Poor little gudgeons!" he echoes stupidly, and then begins to laugh at
his own wool-gathering.
"And now I suppose you will be going directly--going home?" pursues she,
looking at him and his laughter with a soft surprise.
"I hope so; and--and--you too?"
She gives a start, and the sky-coloured nosegay in her hand drops into
her lap.
"We--we? Why should _we_ go home? We have nothing pleasant to go to,
and"--looking round with a passionate relish at mountain, and suffused
far plain, and sappy spring grass--"we are so well--so infinitely well
here!" Then, pulling herself together, and speaking in a more composed
key, "But yes, of course we, too, shall go by-and-by; this cannot last
for ever--nothing lasts for ever. That is the one thought that has kept
me alive all these years; but now----"
She breaks off.
"But now?"
Even as he watches her, putting this echoed interrogation, he sees the
radiance breaking through the cloud his question had gathered, as a very
strong sun breaks through a very translucent exhalation.
"But now?" she repeats vaguely, and smiling to herself, forgetful of his
very presence beside her--"But now? Did I say 'But now?' Ah, here they
are back again!"