"I am going to turn the tables on you," says Amelia next morning to her
lover, after the usual endearments, which of late he has been
conscientiously anxious not to scant or slur, have passed between them,
very fairly executed by him, and adoringly accepted and returned by her;
"you are always arranging treats for me; now I have planned one for
you!"
She looks so beaming with benevolent joy as she makes this statement,
that Jim stoops and drops an extra kiss--not in the bond--upon her
lifted face. "Indeed, dear!" he answers kindly, "I do not quite know
what I have done to deserve it; but I hope it is a nice one."
"It is very nice--delightful."
"Delightful, eh?" echoes he, raising his brows, while a transient wonder
crosses his mind as to what project she or anyone else could suggest to
him that, at this juncture of his affairs, could merit that epithet;
"well, am I to guess what it is? or are you going to tell me?"
Amelia's face still wears that smile of complacent confidence in having
something pleasant to communicate which has puzzled her companion.
"We have never been at Vallombrosa, have we?" asks she.
"Never."
"Well, we are going there to-morrow."
"Are we? is that your treat?" inquires he, wondering what of peculiarly
and distinctively festal for him this expedition may be supposed to have
above all their former ones.
"And we are not going alone."
"There is nothing very exceptional in that; Cecilia is mostly good
enough to lend us her company."
"I am not thinking of Cecilia; I have persuaded"--the benevolent smile
broadening across her cheeks--"I have persuaded some friends of yours to
join us."
It does not for an instant cross his mind either to doubt or to affect
uncertainty as to who the friends of whom she speaks may be; but the
suggestion is so profoundly unwelcome to him, that not even the
certainty of mortifying the unselfish creature before him can hinder him
from showing it. Her countenance falls.
"You are not glad?" she asks crestfallenly, "you are not pleased?"
It is impossible for him to say that he is, and all that is left to him
is to put his vexation into words that may be as little as possible
fraught with disappointment to his poor hearer's ear.
"I--I--had rather have had you to myself."
"Would you really?" she asks, in the almost awed tones of one who, from
being quite destitute, has had the Koh-i-Noor put into his hand, and
whose fingers are afraid to close over the mighty jewel; "would you
really? then I am sorry I asked them; but"--with intense
wistfulness--"if you only knew how I long to give you a little pleasure,
a little enjoyment--you who have given me so infinitely much."
If Miss Wilson were ever addicted to the figure of speech called irony,
she might be supposed to be employing it now; but one glance at her
simple face would show that it expressed nothing but adoring gratitude.
Her one good fortnight has spread its radiant veil backwards over her
eight barren years.
He takes her hand, and passes the fingers across his lips, murmuring
indistinctly and guiltily behind them:
"Do I really make you happy?"
"Do you?"--echoes she, while the transfiguring tears well into her
glorified pale eyes--"I should not have thought it possible that so much
joy could have been packed into any fortnight as I have had crammed into
mine!"
They have to set off to Vallombrosa at seven o'clock in the morning, an
hour at which few of us are at our cleverest, handsomest, or our best
tempered; nor is the party of six, either in its proportion of women to
men--four to two--or in its component parts, a very well adjusted one.
They are too numerous to be contained in one carriage, and are therefore
divided into two separate bands--three and three. Whether by some
manoeuvre of the well-meaning Amelia, or by some scarcely fortunate
accident, Burgoyne finds himself seated opposite to his betrothed and to
Elizabeth; while Byng follows in the second vehicle as _vis-a-vis_ to
Cecilia and Mrs. Le Marchant. There is a general feeling of wrongness
about the whole arrangement--a sense of mental discomfort equivalent to
that physical one of having put on your clothes inside out, or buttoned
your buttons into unanswering buttonholes.
Mrs. Le Marchant's face, as Burgoyne catches sight of it now and then,
as some turn in the road reveals the inmates of the closely-following
second carriage to his view, wears that uneasy and disquieted look which
always disfigures it when there is any question of her being brought
into personal relation with strangers. And Elizabeth, of whom he has
naturally a much nearer and more continuous view, is plainly
ill-at-ease. Miss Wilson has not thought it necessary to mention to her
lover how strong had been the opposition to her plan on the part of the
objects of it; nor, that it was only because her proposal was made _viva
voce_, and therefore unescapable, that it had been reluctantly accepted
at last. At first Burgoyne had attributed Elizabeth's evident
ill-at-easeness to her separation from Byng; but he presently discovers
that it is what she possesses, and not what she lacks, that is the chief
source of her _malaise_. During the latter part of his own personal
intercourse with her she had been, when in his company, sometimes sad,
sometimes wildly merry; but always entirely natural. Strange as it may
seem, it is obviously the presence of Amelia that puts constraint upon
her. Before the spirit of that most unterrifying of God's creatures,
Elizabeth's "stands rebuked." Once or twice he sees her inborn
gaiety--that gaiety whose existence he has so often noted as it
struggles up from under the mysterious weight of sorrow laid upon
it--spurt into life, only to be instantly killed by the reassumption of
that nervous formal manner which not all Amelia's gentle efforts can
break through.
A very grave trio they drive along through the grave day. For it is,
alas! a grave day--overcast, now turning to rain, now growing fair again
awhile. Not a grain of Italy's summer curse, her choking white dust,
assails their nostrils. It must have rained all night. Through the
suburbs by the river, crossing and recrossing that ugly iron interloper
the railway; by the river flowing at the foot of the fair green hills,
so green, so green on this day of ripe accomplished spring. The whole
country is one giant green garland, of young wheat below and endless
vine necklaces above--necklaces of new juicy, just-born, yet vigorous
vine-leaves. The very river runs green with the reflection of the
endless verdure on its banks. The road is level as far as Pontassieve,
the town through which they roll, and then it begins to mount--mounts
between garden-like hills, dressed in vine leaves and iris-flowers, and
the dull fire of red clover; while the stream twists in flowing
companionship at the valley bottom, until they turn abruptly away from
it, up into a steep and narrow valley, almost a gorge, and climb up and
up one side of it, turning and winding continually to break the
steepness of the ascent. However broken, it is steep still. But who
would wish to pass at more than a foot's pace through this great sheet
of lilac irises wrapping the mountain side, past this bean-field that
greets the nostrils with its homely familiar perfume, along this wealthy
bit of hedge, framed wholly of honeysuckle in flower? At sight of the
latter Elizabeth gives a little cry.
"Oh, what honeysuckle! I must have some! I must get out! Tell him to
stop!"
In a moment her commands are obeyed; in another moment Byng has sprung
out of the second carriage and is standing beside her. The door of
Byng's vehicle is stiff apparently, and a sardonic smile breaks over the
elder man's face as he hears the noise of the resounding kicks
administered to it by the younger one's impatient foot. But he need not
have been in such a hurry--no one interferes with his office of rifling
the hedge of its creamy and coral bugles.
Burgoyne gets out of the carriage; but it is only to walk to the other
one and assume Byng's vacated seat.
"Are you going to change places?" Amelia has asked rather chapfallenly
as he leaves her; and he has given her hand a hasty pressure, and
answered affectionately--
"It will not be for long, dear; but you know"--with an expressive
glance, and what he rather too sanguinely hopes looks like a smile in
the direction of the flower-gatherers--"fair play is a jewel!"
If his departure from the one vehicle is deplored, it is not welcomed at
the other. Cecilia asks the same question as her sister had put, though
the intonation is different.
"Are you going to change places?"--adding--"do not you think we did very
well as we were?"
But probably he is too much occupied in wrestling with the stiff door to
hear her, for he makes no answer beyond getting in. The only reward that
he receives for his piece of self-sacrifice is a rapturous look of
gratitude from Byng, when he perceives the changed position of his
affairs, and that recompense Jim had far rather have been without.
They are off again. Being now second in the little procession, Burgoyne
has but meagre and difficult views of the first; but now and again, when
the road describes an acuter angle than usual, he can by turning his
whole body, under pretext of admiring the view, snatch a glimpse of all
three occupants leaning their heads sociably together, evidently in
bright light talk. After all, he had deceived himself. It is he and not
Amelia who had made her shy. Even when he cannot see her, there come to
his ears little wafts of laughter, in which her voice is mixed. He
catches himself trying to recall whether she had laughed even once
during the period of his being her companion. There is not much mirth in
his own carriage. What a kill-joy he has grown! Cecilia, though her
heart is as pure as the babe unborn of any serious designs on Byng, of
which indeed she has long seen the fruitlessness, yet thinks a sulky
brother-in-law-elect but a poor exchange for a handsome young
acquaintance, whom neither his good manners nor the amount of his
intimacy allow to sit opposite to her in grumpy silence. Mrs. Le
Marchant is obviously as ill at ease as was her daughter when in his
fellowship, though in this case a little observation shows him that he
counts for nothing in her discomfort of mind, but that she is watching
the other half of the party with an anxiety as keen, if almost as
covert, as his own. She is too well-bred indeed not to endeavour to keep
up a decent show of conversation, but as neither of her companions makes
any effort to second her, an ever-deepening silence falls upon them as
they advance, nor, as the day grows older, is the weather calculated to
exhilarate their spirits.
The sky's frown becomes more and more pronounced the higher they mount.
Through a village nobly seated on its hilltop, but, like most Italian
townlets, squalid enough on a nearer view--up and up--up and up--till
they reach what were once groves of stately chestnuts, but where the
hungry Tuscan axe has left nothing but twigs and saplings, but never a
spreading tree; then on into the fir-woods, which are woods indeed,
though even here the hatchet's cruel tooth has begun to bite. No sooner
is their dark umbrage reached than the mist, that has been hanging with
threatening lowness above the travellers' heads, comes down close,
blinding, clinging like wet flannel, and as thick.
"Perhaps it will lift," Jim says, with a sort of dismal unlikely
hopefulness as he strains his eyes, trying to look down the straight
solemn fir aisles, with their files upon files of tall stems, that seem
to be seen only as if through a thick gauze. Neither of his companions
has the spirit necessary to echo the supposition. The road winds
endlessly, steeper and steeper up through the mist. The tired horses
step wearily, and the unfortunate pleasure-seekers are beginning to
think that the muffled monotony of firs, of winding road, of painfully
labouring horses, will never end, when the vetturino turns round with a
smile on his fog-wet face, and says, "Vallombrosa!"
Under other circumstances, the announcement might have been cheering,
might have excited a poetic curiosity; but as it is, the hood of the
vehicle--necessarily raised some miles back--is so far poked forward
that nothing is to be seen but a pour of rain--the rain has begun to
descend in torrents--a glass-door in a house-wall opening to admit them,
and a waiter holding up a green umbrella to protect their descent.
Neither he nor the landlord, nor yet the chambermaid, show any signs of
mirth or wonder at their arrival among the clouds on such a day. They
are used to mad Inglese. And amongst the mad Inglese themselves there is
certainly no temptation to mad merriment. On such an occasion there is
nothing to do but eat, so they lunch dismally in a long, bare
dining-room, with a carpetless floor, a table laid for a grossly
improbable number of guests, and a feeling of searching cold. Having
spun out their scanty meal to the utmost limits of possibility, and
washed it down with the weakest red wine that ever lived in a wicker
bottle, they pass into a funereal _salon_, to which the waiter invites
them. Someone makes the cheering announcement that they have as yet been
here only half an hour, and that the horses must have two full hours to
bait before there can be any question of beginning the return journey.
And then they amble about the room, looking at the dreadful lithographs
of Italy's plain King and fair Queen on the walls; at the venerable
journals and gaudy English storybook, so dull as to have been forgotten
by its owner, on the table. Their spirits are not heightened by a
pervading sense as of being in a cellar, minus the wine. The equipment
of this pleasant apartment is completed by a half-dead nosegay of what
must once have been charming mountain blossoms. The sight decides them.
They must go out. Perhaps even through this opaque cloud they may dimly
see the mountain flowers growing, the mountain brooks dashing, which
John Milton has told them that--
"the Etrurian shades,
High over-arch'd imbower."
They all catch at the suggestion, when made by Byng, and presently sally
forth to see as much of Vallombrosa as a fog that would not have
disgraced the Strand, as a close blanket of almost _confluent_ rain, and
as umbrellas held well down over their cold noses, will let them; Mrs.
Le Marchant alone declines to be one of the party, and is left sitting,
swaddled in all the superfluous wraps, on a horsehair chair in the
_salon_, to stare at the wall and at King Humbert's ugly face, until
such time as her companions see fit to release her. It is no wonder that
Burgoyne overhears her eagerly whispering to Elizabeth a request that
she will not stay too long away. And Elizabeth, whose spirits have gone
up like a rocket at the prospect of a taste of the fresh air, and who
knows what else, lays her little face, crowned with a deer-stalking cap,
against her mother's, and promises, and skips away.
At first they all five keep together, wet but sociable. They ask their
way to the Paradiso--the name sounds ironical--and set off climbing up
through the fir-wood in the direction indicated; along a path which in
fair weather must be heavenly with piny odours, but which is now only a
miry alternative of dripping stones and muddy puddles. Through the mist
they see indeed fair flowers gleaming, yellow anemones, unfamiliar and
lovely, but they are too drenched to pluck. The sound of falling water
guides them to where the clear brook--clear even to-day--falls in little
cascades down the hill's face between the pines. How delicious to sit on
its flat stones some hot summer's noon, with your hands coolly straying
among its grasses, or dabbling in its bright water; but to-day they can
but look at it sadly from the low bridge, saying sighingly, "If!"
They reach the goal, some cross, and all floundering, the ladies with
draggled skirts and cold, dank ankles. The Paradiso is a little house, a
_dependance_ apparently of the hotel below--apparently also tenantless
and empty. It is built on the bare rock, looking sheer down on--what? on
a blanket of fog. What does, what can, that maddening blanket conceal?
Oh, if they could but tear it in pieces, rend it asunder, hack it with
knives, by any means abolish its unsightly veil from over the lovely
face they will now, with all their climbing, all their early rising,
never see! But will not they? Even as they look, despairingly straining
their eyes, in the vain effort to pierce that obscure and baffling veil,
there is a movement in it, a stirring of the inert mass of vapour; a
wind has risen, and is blowing coldly on their brows, and in a moment,
as it seems, the maddening wet curtain is swept away and up, as by some
God-hand, the hand of some spirit that has heard their lament and has
pitied them and said, "They have come from afar; it is their only
chance; let us show it to them." The curtain has rolled up and up, the
sombre fir-wood starts out, and the emerald meadows, the lowest and
nearest range of hills, then the next, and then the next, and then the
furthest and highest of all. There they stand revealed, even the city,
Florence, far away. They can make out her Duomo, small and dim with
distance, yet certainly there; in the sudden effulgence all the valley
alight and radiant. Range behind range stand the hills; belated vapour
wreaths floating, thin as lawn, up their flanks; wonderful dreamy
patches of radiance on the far slopes; marvellous amethysts starring
their breasts. Mystery and beauty, colour and space, sky and lovely
land, where, five minutes ago, there was nothing but choking fog.
Burgoyne stands as in a trance, vaguely conscious--trance-wise too--that
Elizabeth is near him; all his soul passed into his eyes; stands--how
long? He hardly knows. Before that fair sight time seems dead; but even
as he yet looks, smiling as one smiles at anything surpassingly lovely,
the cloud-wreaths float downwards again, wreaths at first, then great
volumes, then one universal sheet of vapour, impenetrably dense as
before. Vanished are the Apennine slopes, sun-kissed and dreamy;
vanished the distant Arno plain; vanished even the near pines. He can
scarce see his hand before him. And yet he can see Elizabeth's face
transfigured and quivering, lifted to his--yes, to _his_--though Byng is
on her other side; her eyes full of tender tears of ravishment, while
her low voice says sighingly:
"It is gone; but we have seen it! Nothing can ever take that from us!
nothing! nothing!"
And although the next moment she is reabsorbed into the fog and Byng,
though for the rest of the deplorable walk he scarce catches sight again
of the little brown head and the soaked deer-stalking cap, yet it makes
a gentle warmth about his chilled heart to think that, in her moments of
highest emotion, it is her impulse to turn to him.