"Oh, gentle Proteus, Love's a mighty lord,
And hath so humbled me that I confess
There is no grief to his correction
Nor to his service no such joy on earth.
Now no discourse except it be of Love;
Now can I break my fast, dine, sup and sleep
Upon the very naked name of Love."
Not once again, so long as they remain at Vallombrosa, does the envious
cloud-blanket lift; and, after slopping about for some time longer, in
the vain hope that it will, Burgoyne and his two female relatives-elect
return to the inn, all fallen very silent. The other two members of the
party have disappeared into the fog. At the door of the hotel they find
Mrs. Le Marchant, who has broken from her cerements, and is looking
anxiously out. As she catches sight of them the look of tension on her
face lessens.
"Oh, here you are!" says she. "I am so glad; and the others--no doubt
the others are close behind."
"We know nothing about the others," replies Cecilia, with some
ill-humour, taking upon her the office of spokeswoman, which neither of
her companions seems in any hurry to assume; "the others took French
leave of us an hour ago. Oh dear, how wet I am! What a horrible
excursion! How I detest Vallombrosa!"
Amelia is to the full as wet as her sister; nothing can well be more
lamentable than the appearance of either; and upon Amelia's face there
is, in addition to a handsome share of splashes of rain, a look of
mortification and crestfallenness; but she now puts in her word, with
her usual patience and thoughtful good-temper.
"I do not think you need be in the least anxious about them," she says,
observing the immediate relapse into what seems an exaggerated concern
following instantly upon Cecilia's remark on Mrs. Le Marchant's
features; "they were with us not long ago. We were certainly all
together not so long ago; they were with us at the Paradiso--they were
certainly with us at the Paradiso?" turning with an interrogative air to
Burgoyne.
"Yes, they were certainly with us at the Paradiso," he assents, not
thinking it necessary to add why he is so very certain as to this fact.
"They must have so much inducement to loiter this charming weather,"
cries Cecilia, with an exasperated laugh. "Oh, how wet I am! I do not
expect that we shall any of us forget Vallombrosa in a hurry! I shall go
and ask the chambermaid to lend me some dry shoes and stockings."
With these words she walks towards the staircase and climbs it, leaving
a muddy imprint on each step to mark her progress as she mounts.
Amelia does not at once follow her example. She remains standing where
she was, her arms hanging listlessly by her sides, and the expression of
crestfallenness deepened on her fagged face. Her lover is touched by her
look, and, going up to her, lays his hand kindly and solicitously on her
shoulder.
"Umbrellas are not what they were in my days," he says, trying to smile.
"You are quite as wet as Cis, though you do not proclaim your sufferings
nearly so loudly. Had not you better go and see whether the chambermaid
owns two pairs of dry stockings?"
She lifts her eyes with wistful gratitude to his. "This is my treat,"
she says slowly; "my first treat to you; oh, poor Jim!"
There is a depth of compassion in her tone as disproportioned to the
apparent cause as had been Mrs. Le Marchant's anxiety for her daughter's
return, and beneath it he winces.
"Why do you pity me?" he inquires half indignantly.
"Am I--
"'A milksop; one that never in his life
Felt so much cold as over shoes in snow?'
What do I care for a little rain?" Adding cheerfully, "You shall give me
a second treat, dear; we will come here again by ourselves when the sun
shines."
"By ourselves--when the sun shines!" echoes she, as if repeating a
lesson; and then she goes off docilely, in obedience to his suggestion,
in search of dry raiment.
He rejoins Mrs. Le Marchant, whose unaccountable fears have led her
beyond the house's shelter out into the rain, where she stands looking
down that river of mud which represents the road by which she hopes to
see the truants reappear.
"I think you are unnecessarily alarmed," he says, in a reassuring and
remonstrating tone. "What harm could have happened to them?"
She does not answer, her eyes, into which the rain is beating under her
umbrella brim, still fixed upon the empty road.
"Is she--is she apt to take cold?" he asks, his own tone catching the
infection of her vague and nameless disquiet.
"Yes--no--not particularly, I think. Oh, it is not that!"--her composure
breaking down into an unaffected outburst of distress. "It is not that!
Do not you understand? Oh, how unwilling I was to come here to-day! It
is--do not you see? Oh, I should not mind in the least if it had been
you that were with her!"
"If it had been I that was with her?" repeats Jim slowly, not at the
first instant comprehending, nor even at the second quite taking in the
full, though unintentional, uncomplimentariness of this speech; which,
however, before his companion again takes up her parable, has tinglingly
reached--what? His heart, or only his vanity? They lie very close
together.
"Why did not he go home with his mother?" pursues Mrs. Le Marchant,
still in that voice of intense vexation. "It would have been so much
more natural that he should, and I am sure that she wished it."
"You are making me feel extremely uncomfortable," says Burgoyne gravely;
"when I remember that it was I who introduced him to you."
"Oh, I am not blaming you!" replies she, with an obvious effort to
resume her usual courteous manner. "Please do not think that I am
blaming you. How could you help it?"
"I thought you liked him."
"Oh, so I do--so we both do!" cries the poor woman agitatedly. "That is
the worst of it! If I did not like him, I should not mind; at least, I
should not mind half so much."
"I am very sorry," he begins; but she interrupts him.
"Do not be sorry," she says remorsefully; "you have nothing to say to
it. I do not know, I am sure"--looking gratefully at him through the
rain--"why I am always regaling you with my worries; but you are so
dependable--we both feel that you are so dependable."
"Am I?" says he, with a melancholy air that does not argue much
gratification at the compliment. "Do not be too sure of that."
But she does not heed his disclaimer.
"We have been so happy here," she goes on; "I do not mean
_here_"--looking round with an involuntary smile at the envelope of wet
vapour that encases them both--"but at Florence; so peacefully,
blessedly happy, she and I--you do not know"--with an appealing touch of
pathos--"what a dear little companion she is!--so happy that I naturally
do not want our memory of the place to be spoilt by any painful
_contretemps_. You can understand that, cannot you?"
It is senseless of him; but yet, little as he can comprehend why it
should be so, the idea of Byng's love being described as a "painful
_contretemps_" presents itself not disagreeably to his mind. For
whatever mysterious reason, it is apparent that even Byng's own mother
cannot be much more adverse to his suit than is the lady before him.
"I can perfectly enter into your feelings," he answers, with sympathetic
gravity; "but do not you know that 'a watched pot never boils'? As long
as you are looking for them, they will never appear; but the moment that
your back is turned they will probably come round the corner at once."
"I think it is the truest proverb in the world," she says, with an
impatient sigh; but she allows him to guide her and her umbrella back to
the inn.
Burgoyne's prediction is not verified; probably he had no very great
faith in it himself. Mrs. Le Marchant's back has, for the best part of
an hour, been turned upon the mountain road, and the stragglers have not
yet rejoined the main body. There has been plenty of time for Cecilia to
be thoroughly dried, warmed, comforted, and restored to good humour; for
the _vetturino_ to send in and ask whether he shall not put the horses
to; for Amelia to exhaust all her little repertory of soothing
hypotheses; for Mrs. Le Marchant to stray in restless misery from
_salon_ to _salle-a-manger_ and back again, and for Burgoyne to pull
gloomily at a large cigar in the hall by himself before at length the
voices of the truants are heard.
Burgoyne being, as I have said, in the hall, and therefore nearest the
door of entrance, has the earliest sight of them. His first glance tells
him that the blow apprehended by Mrs. Le Marchant has fallen. Of
Elizabeth, indeed, he scarcely catches a glimpse, as she passes him
precipitately, hurrying to meet her mother, who, at the sound of her
voice, has come running into the outer room. But Byng! Byng has not
experienced so many very strong emotions in his short life as to have
had much practice in veiling them from the eyes of others when they
come, and the gauze now drawn over his intolerable radiance is of the
thinnest description. Again that earnest desire to hit him _hard_
assails the elder friend.
"Why, you are back before us!" cries the young man.
"Yes, we are back before you," replies Burgoyne; and if the penalty had
been death, he could not at that moment have added one syllable to the
acrid assent.
"Are we late?" asks Elizabeth tremulously; "I am afraid we are late--I
am afraid we have kept you waiting! Oh, I am so sorry!"
She looks with an engaging timidity of apology from one to other of the
sulky countenances around her; and Burgoyne stealing a look at her,
their eyes meet. He is startled by the singularity of expression in
hers. Whatever it denotes, it certainly is not the stupid simplicity of
rapture to be read, in print as big as a poster's, in Byng's. And yet,
among the many ingredients that go to make up that shy fevered beam,
rapture is undoubtedly one.
"Did you lose yourselves? Did you go further into the wood?" asks
Cecilia, with a curiosity that is, considering the provocation given,
not unjustifiable.
They both reply vaguely that they had lost themselves, that they had
gone deeper into the wood. It is obvious to the meanest intelligence
that neither of them has the slightest idea where they have been.
"I may as well tell the driver to put the horses in," says Burgoyne, in
a matter-of-fact voice, glad of an excuse to absent himself.
When he comes back, he finds the Le Marchants standing together in the
window, talking in a low voice, and Byng hovering near them. It is
evident to Jim that the elder woman has no wish for converse with the
young man; but in his present condition of dizzy exhilaration, he is
quite unaware of that fact. He approaches her indeed (as the unobserved
watcher notes) with a dreadful air of filial piety, and addresses her in
a tone of apology it is true, but with a twang of intimacy that had
never appeared in his voice before.
"You must not blame her; indeed you must not! it was entirely my fault.
I am awfully sorry that you were alarmed, but indeed there was no cause.
What did you think had happened? Did you think"--with an excited laugh
of triumph and a bright blush--"that I had run off with her?"
The speech is in extremely bad taste, since, whatever may be the posture
of affairs between himself and Elizabeth, it is morally impossible that
her mother can yet be enlightened as to it; the familiarity of it is
therefore premature and the jocosity ill-placed. No one can be more
disposed to judge it severely than its unintended auditor; but even he
is startled by the effect it produces.
Without making the smallest attempt at an answer, Mrs. Le Marchant
instantly turns her shoulder upon the young man--a snub of which Jim
would have thought so gentle-mannered a person quite incapable, and
walks away from him with so determined an air that not even a person in
the seventh heaven of drunkenness can mistake her meaning. Nor does
Elizabeth's conduct offer him any indemnification. She follows her
mother a little more slowly; and, as she passes Jim, he sees that she is
shaking violently, and that her face is as white as chalk. A sort of
generous indignation against the mother for spoiling the poor little
soul's first moments of bliss mixes curiously in his mind with a less
noble satisfaction at the reflection that there are undoubtedly breakers
ahead of Byng.
"How--how are we to divide?" cries Cecilia, as they all stand at the
door while the two carriages drive up.
No one answers. The arrangement seems planned by no one in particular,
and yet, as he drives down the hill, Burgoyne finds himself sitting
opposite the two Misses Wilson. He is thankful that the raised hood and
unfurled umbrellas of the second equipage prevent his having any ocular
evidence of the ecstasy that that wet leather and that dripping silk
veil. But even this consolation is not long left him. As they leave the
fir-wood, they come out of the clouds too, into clear, lower air. Hoods
are pushed back and umbrellas shut. The horses, in good heart, with
homeward-turned heads, pricked with emulation by another carriage ahead
of them, trot cheerfully down the road--the road with all its bent-elbow
turnings--down, down, into the valley beneath. But the clouds that have
rolled away off the evening sky seem to have settled down with double
density upon the spirit of Burgoyne and his companions. Even the
fountain of Cecilia's chatter is dried. Once she says suddenly _a propos
de bottes_:
"She must be years older than he!" To which Amelia quickly rejoins--
"But she does not look it."
It is almost the only remark she makes during the long drive, and
Burgoyne is thankful to her for her silence. Conscious of and grateful
for her magnanimity as he is, there is yet something that jars upon him
in her intuition of his thoughts, and in her eager championship of that
other woman. He looks out blankly at the flowers, wetly smiling from
field and bank, at the endless garden of embracing vines and embraced
mulberries, joining their young leafage; at the stealing river and the
verdurous hill-sides. In vain for him Italy's spring laughter broadens
across the eternal youth of her face.
On reaching Florence and the Anglo-Americain, he would fain enter and
spend the evening with his betrothed. He has a feverish horror of being
left alone with his own thoughts, but she gently forbids him.
"It would not be fair upon father and Sybilla," she says. "I am afraid
they have not been getting on very well _tete-a-tete_ together all this
wet day, and I should not be much good to you in any case. I feel
stupid. You will say"--smiling--"that there is nothing very new in that;
but I am quite beyond even my usual mark to-night. Good-night, dear; I
humbly beg your pardon for having caused you to spend such a wretched
day. I will never give you another treat--never, _never!_ it was my
first and last attempt."
She turns from him dejectedly, and he is himself too dejected to attempt
any reassuring falsities. She would not have believed him if he had told
her that it had not been a wretched day to him, and the publicity of
their place of parting forbids him to administer even the silent
consolation of a kiss. And yet he feels a sort of remorse at having said
nothing, as the door closes upon her depressed back. Backs can look
quite as depressed as faces. The lateness of their start home has thrown
their return late. Burgoyne reflects that he may as well dine at once,
and then trudge through his solitary evening as best he may. Heaven
knows at what hour Byng may return. Shall he await his coming, and so
get over the announcement of his bliss to-night, or put the dark hours
between himself and it?
He decides in favour of getting it over to-night, up to whatever small
hour he may be obliged to attend his friend's arrival. But he has not to
wait nearly so long as he expects. He has not to wait at all, hardly.
Before he has left his own room, while he is still making such toilette
for his own company as self-respect requires, the person whom he had not
thought to behold for another four or five hours enters--enters with
head held high, with joy-tinged, smooth cheeks, and with a superb lamp
of love and triumph lit in each young eye. A passing movement of
involuntary admiration traverses the other's heart as he looks at him.
This is how the human animal ought to--was originally intended to--look!
How very far the average specimen has departed from the type! There is
not much trace of admiration, however, in the tone which he employs for
his one brief word of interrogation:
"Already?"
"I was sent away," replies Byng, in a voice whose intoxication pierces
even through the first four small words; "they sent me away--they would
not let me go further than the house-door. I say 'they,' but of course
_she_ had no hand in it--_she_, not _she_. _She_ would not have sent me
away, God bless her! it was her mother, of course--how could she have
had the heart?"
Burgoyne would no doubt have made some answer in time; though the "she,"
the implication of Elizabeth's willingness for an indefinite amount of
her lover's company, the "God bless her," gave him a sense of choking.
"But I do not blame Mrs. Le Marchant," pursues Byng, in a rapt,
half-absent key. "Who would not wish to monopolize her? Who would not
grudge the earth leave to kiss her sweet foot?
"'All I can is nothing
To her whose worth makes other worthies nothing.
She is alone!'"
"That at least is not your fault," replies Burgoyne dryly; "you have
done your best to avert that catastrophe."
But to speak to the young man now is of as much avail as to address
questions or remonstrances to one walking in his sleep.
"If she had allowed me, I would have lain on her threshold all night; I
would have been the first thing that her heavenly eye lit on; I would--"
But Burgoyne's phial of patience is for the present emptied to the
dregs.
"You would have made a very great fool of yourself, I have not the least
doubt. Why try to persuade a person of what he is already fully
convinced? But as Miss Le Marchant happily did not wish for you as a
doormat, perhaps it is hardly worth while telling me what you would have
done if she had."
The sarcastic words, ill-natured and unsympathetic as they sound in
their own speaker's ears, yet avail to bring the young dreamer but a
very few steps lower down his ladder of bliss.
"I beg your pardon," he says sweet-temperedly; "I suppose I am a hideous
bore to-night; I suppose one must always be a bore to other people when
one is tremendously happy."
"It is not your being tremendously happy that I quarrel with," growls
Burgoyne, struggling to conquer, or at least tone down, the intense
irritability of nerves that his friend's flights provoke. "You are
perfectly right to be that if you can manage to compass it; but what I
should be glad to arrive at is your particular ground for it in the
present case."
The question, sobering in its tendency, has yet for sole effect the
setting Byng off again with spread pinions into the empyrean.
"What particular ground I have?" he repeats, in a dreamy tone of
ecstasy. "You ask what particular ground I have? Had ever anyone cause
to be so royally happy as I?"
He pauses a moment or two, steeped in a rapture of oblivious reverie,
then goes on, still as one only half waked from a beatific vision:
"I had a prognostic that to-day would be the culminating day--something
told me that to-day would be the day; and when you gave me up your seat
in her carriage--how could you be so magnificently generous? How can I
ever adequately show you my gratitude?"
"Yes, yes; never mind that."
"Then, later on, in the wood"--his voice sinking, as that of one who
approaches a Holy of Holies--"when that blessed mist wrapped her round,
wrapped her lovely body round, so that I was able to withdraw her from
you, so that you did not perceive that she was gone--were not you really
aware of it? Did not it seem to you as if the light had gone out of the
day? When we stood under those dripping trees, as much alone as if--"
"I do not think that there is any need to go into those details,"
interrupts Burgoyne, in a hard voice; "I imagine that in these cases
history repeats itself with very trifling variations; what I should be
glad if you would tell me is, whether I am to understand that you have
to-day asked Miss Le Marchant to marry you?"
Byng brings his eyes, which have been lifted in a sort of trance to the
ceiling, down to the prosaic level of his Mentor's severe and
tight-lipped face.
"When you put it in that way," he says, in an awed half-whisper, "it
does seem an inconceivable audacity on my part that I, who but a few
days ago was crawling at her feet, should dare to-day to reach up to the
heaven of her love."
Burgoyne had known perfectly well that it was coming; but yet how much
worse is it than he had expected!
"Then you _did_ ask her to marry you?"
But Byng has apparently fled back on the wings of fantasy into the wet
woods of Vallombrosa, for he makes no verbal answer.
"She said yes?" asks Burgoyne, raising his voice, as if he were
addressing someone deaf. "Am I to understand that she said yes?"
At the sound of that hard naked query the dreamer comes out of his
enchanted forest again.
"I do not know what she said; I do not think she said anything," he
answers, murmuring the words laggingly; while, as he goes on, the fire
of his madness spires high in his flashing eyes. "We have got beyond
speech, she and I! We have reached that region where hearts and
intelligences meet without the need of those vulgar go-betweens--words."
There is a moment's pause, broken only by the commonplace sound of an
electric bell rung by some inmate of the hotel.
"And has Mrs. Le Marchant reached that region too?" inquires Jim
presently, with an irony he cannot restrain. "Does she, too, understand
without words, or have you been obliged, in her case, to employ those
vulgar go-betweens?"
"She _must_ understand--she _does_--undoubtedly she does!" cries Byng,
whose drunkenness shares with the more ordinary kind the peculiarity of
believing whatever he wishes to be not only probable but inevitable.
"Who could see us together and be in uncertainty for a moment? And her
mother has some of her fine instincts, her delicate intuitions; not, of
course, to the miraculous extent that _she_ possesses them. In _her_
they amount to genius!"
"No doubt, no doubt; but did you trust entirely to Mrs. Le Marchant's
instincts, or did you broach the subject to her at all? You must have
had time, plenty of time, during that long drive home."
"Well, no," answers Byng slowly, and with a slight diminution of
radiance. "I meant to have approached it; I tried to do so once or
twice; but I thought, I fancied--probably it was only fancy--that she
wished to avoid it."
"To avoid it?"
"Oh, not in any offensive, obvious way; it was probably only in my
imagination that she shirked it at all--and I did not make any great
efforts. It was all so perfect"--the intoxication getting the upper hand
again--"driving along in that balmy flood of evening radiance--did you
see how even the tardy sun came out for us?--with that divine face
opposite to me! Such a little face!"--his voice breaking into a tremor.
"Is not it inconceivable, Jim, how so much beauty can be packed into so
tiny a compass?"
Burgoyne has all the time had his brushes in his hand, the brushes with
which he has been preparing himself for his solitary dinner. He bangs
them down now on the table. How can he put a period to the ravings of
this maniac? And yet not so maniac either. What gives the sharpest point
to his present suffering is the consciousness that he would have made
quite as good a maniac himself if he had had the chance. This
consciousness instils a few drops of angry patience into his voice, as,
disregarding the other's high-flown question, he puts one that is not at
all high-flown himself.
"Then you have not told Mrs. Le Marchant yet?"
But the smile that the memory--so fresh, only half an hour old--of
Elizabeth's loveliness has laid upon Byng's lips still lingers there;
and makes his response dreamy and vague.
"No, not yet; not yet! _She_ had taken one of her gloves off; her little
hand lay, palm upward, on her knees almost all the way; once or twice I
thought of taking it, of taking possession of it, of telling her mother
in that way; but I did not. It seemed--out in the sunshine, no longer in
the sacred mist of that blessed wood--too high an audacity, and I did
not!"
He stops, his words dying away into a whisper, his throat's too narrow
passage choked by the rushing ocean of his immense felicity.
Burgoyne looks at him in silence, again with a sort of admiration mixed
with wrath. How has this commonplace, pink-and-white boy managed to
scale such an altitude, while he himself, in all his life, though with a
better intelligence, and, as he had thought, with a deeper heart, had
but prowled around the foot? Why should he try to drag him down? On the
peak of that great Jungfrau of rapture no human foot can long stand.
"As I told you, Mrs. Le Marchant turned me away from their door,"
pursues Byng. "It struck me--I could not pay much attention to the fact,
for was not I bidding _her_ good-night--taking farewell of those
heavenly eyes?--did you ever see such astonishing eyes?--for four
colossal hours--but it struck me that her mother's manner was a little
colder to me than it usually is. It had been a little cold all day--at
least, so I fancied. Had the same idea occurred to you?"
Burgoyne hesitates.
"But even if it were so," continues Byng, his sun breaking out again in
full brilliancy from the very little cloud that, during his last
sentence or two, had dimmed its lustre, "how can I blame her? Does one
throw one's self into the arms of the burglar who has broken open one's
safe and stolen one's diamonds?"
Burgoyne still hesitates. Shall he tell the young ranter before him what
excellent reasons he has for knowing that any filial disposition on his
part to throw himself on Mrs. Le Marchant's neck will be met by a very
distinct resistance on that lady's part, or shall he leave him poised on
"The jag
Of his mountain crag"
till morning? The morning light will certainly see him tumbling at the
least some few kilometres down. He decides generously to leave him in
present possession of his peak; but yet, so inconsistent is human
nature, his next speech can have no drift but that of giving a slight
jog to his friend's towering confidence.
"And your own mother?"
It may generally be concluded that a person has not a very pertinent
response to give to a question if his only answer to that question be to
repeat it in the same words.
"My own mother?"
"Yes; you will write at once to tell her, I suppose?"
For a second the young man's forehead clouds, then he breaks into an
excited laugh.
"Tell her? I should rather think I should! Do you suppose that I shall
lose a moment in telling everybody I know--everybody I ever heard of? I
want you to tell everybody too--every single soul of your acquaintance!"
"_I?_"
"Tell Amelia; tell Cecilia"--quite unaware, in his excitement, of the
freedom he is taking, for the first time in his life, with those young
ladies' Christian names--"tell the other one--the sick one; tell them
all! I want _her_ to feel that all my friends, everybody I know, welcome
her--hold out their arms to her. I want them all to tell her they are
glad--you most of all, of course, old chap; she will not think it is all
right till you have given your consent!"--laughing again with that
bubbling-over of superfluous joy. "Do you know--it seems
incomprehensible now--but there was a moment when I was madly jealous of
you? I was telling _her_ about it to-day; we were laughing over it
together in the wood."
Burgoyne feels that one more mention of that wood will convert him into
a lunatic, quite as indisputable as his companion, only very much more
dangerous.
"Indeed!" he says grimly. "I should have thought you might have found a
more interesting subject of conversation."
"Perhaps I was not so very far out either"--possibly dimly perceiving,
even through the golden haze of his own glory, the lack of enjoyment of
his last piece of news conveyed by Jim's tone--"for she has an immense
opinion of you. I do not know anyone of whom she has so high an opinion;
she says you are so dependable."
The adjective, as applied to himself by Elizabeth and her mother, has
not the merit of novelty in the hearer's ears, which is perhaps the
reason why the elation that he must naturally feel on hearing it does
not translate itself into words.
"So dependable," repeats Byng, apparently pleased with the epithet. "She
says you give her the idea of being a sort of rock; you will come
to-morrow, and wish her joy, will not you?"
"I am afraid that my wishing it her will not help her much to it,"
answers Burgoyne, rather sadly; "but I do not think you need much doubt
that I do wish it. Joy"--repeating the word over reflectively--"it is a
big thing to wish anyone."
The extreme dampness of his tone arrests for a few minutes Byng's
jubilant paean.
"You do not think that my mother will be pleased with the news?" he asks
presently, in a changed and hesitating key.
"I do not think about it; I know she will not!"
"I suppose not; and yet"--with an accent of stupefaction--"it is
inconceivable that she, who has always shown such a tender sympathy for
me in any paltry little bit of luck that has happened to me, should not
rejoice with me when all heaven ope----"
"Yes, yes; of course."
"Do you think"--with a gleam of hope--"that my mother may have tried to
dissuade me because she thought I was only laying up disappointment for
myself--because she thought it so unlikely that _she_ should deign to
stoop to me?"
Burgoyne shakes his head.
"Perhaps," he says, with the slowness of a man who is saying what he
himself does not believe, "a part of your mother's dislike to the idea
may be in the fact of Miss Le Marchant's being older than you."
"_Older!_" cries Byng, with almost a shout of angry derision at the
suggestion. "What have creatures like _her_ to do with age? I neither
know nor care what her age is! If you know, do not tell me! I will not
listen! Upon that exquisite body time and change are powerless to work
their hideous metamorphoses!"
"Fiddlesticks!" replies Burgoyne gruffly. "If she live long enough, she
will be an old woman, and will look like one, I suppose!" though, even
as he speaks, he realizes that to him this is almost as incredible as to
the young madman whom he is so pitilessly snubbing. "But, however that
may be, I think you had better make up your mind to meeting the most
resolved opposition on the part of your mother."
"I believe you are right," replies Byng, out of whose voice his kind
Mentor has at last succeeded in momentarily conjuring the exaltation.
"Her prejudice against them, against _her_, always filled me with
stupefaction. I never dared trust myself to discuss it with her; I was
afraid that if I did I might be led into saying something to her,
something I should be sorry for afterwards. Thank God, I have never
spoken unkindly to her in all my life!"
"You would have been a sweep if you had!" interjects Jim.
"I never heard her give any reason for it, did you? It was as baseless
as it was senseless." After a pause, his voice taking on again its
inflection of confident, soaring triumph: "But it cannot last--it is
absolutely beyond the wildest bounds of possibility that it can last!
After five minutes' talk mother will be at her feet; I know my mother so
well! Not one of her exquisite ways will be lost upon her, and _she_
will do her very best to win her! Jim, I ask you--I put it to you
quietly and plainly--I know you think I am mad, but I am not--I am
speaking quite rationally and coolly--but I ask you--_you_, an impartial
bystander--do you think that any human being, anything made of flesh and
blood, could resist _her_--_her_ when she puts herself out to
please--_her_ at her very best?"
As Burgoyne is conscious of not being in a position to answer this
question with much satisfaction to himself, he leaves it unanswered.