"Some say the genius so
Cries 'Come' to him that instantly must die."
A new day has awaked, and Firenze, fresh-washed after yesterday's rain,
smelling through all her streets of lilies, laughs up, wistaria-hung, to
a fleckless sky. If poor Amelia had but deferred her treat for
twenty-four hours, what a different Vallombrosa would she and her
companions have carried home in their memories! Amelia's treat!
"I shall not forget Amelia's treat in a hurry!" Burgoyne says to
himself, as he sits appetiteless over his solitary breakfast. "I had
better go and tell her the result of it."
As he makes this reflection, he rises with some alacrity, and, leaving
his scarcely-tasted coffee and his not-at-all-tasted omelette, walks out
of the _salle-a-manger_. His motive for so early a visit to the
Anglo-Americain is less an excessive eagerness to proclaim his piece of
news than the thought that by so doing he will, at least for a few
hours, escape the necessity of being in his young friend's company. As
to where that young friend at present is, whether, after having wandered
about the town all night, he is now sleeping late, or whether he is
already off to persecute poor Mrs. Le Marchant for that maternal
blessing which she has so little inclination to give, Jim is ignorant.
All he knows is that such another dose of Byng's erotic eloquence as he
had to swallow last night will leave him (Burgoyne) either a murderer or
suicide.
Owing to his arrival at the Anglo-Americain so much sooner than usual,
he finds himself coming in for the ceremony of Sybilla's installation
for the day in the drawing-room. There is always a little pomp and fussy
bustle about this rite. Sybilla totters in (grave doubts have
occasionally crossed the minds of her family as to whether she does not
in reality possess a pair of excellent and thoroughly dependable legs),
supported on one side by Amelia and on the other by her maid. Cecilia
goes before with an air cushion, and Mr. Wilson follows, when he does
not turn restive--which is sometimes the case--with a duvet. To-day, as
I have said, this rite is in full celebration when Jim arrives, but it
is being performed with mutilated glories. The rite is going forward,
but the high priest is absent. That ministrant, upon whose arm the
sufferer is wont to lean far the most heavily; she upon whom devolves
the whole responsibility of arranging the three cushions behind the long
limp back; the properly covering the languid feet; the nice
administering of the reviving cordial drops that are to repair the
fatigue of the transit from bedroom to sitting-room--that most important
and unfailing ministrant is nowhere to be seen. No artist wishes his
picture to be viewed in an inchoate, unfinished stage, nor is Sybilla at
all anxious to have the public admitted to the sight of that eminent
work of art herself until she is stretched in faint, moribund, graceful
completeness on her day-bed. At the moment of Burgoyne's entry she has
just reached that unbecoming point, where she is sitting sideways on her
sofa, before her wasted limbs--Burgoyne is one of those heretics who
have never believed that they are wasted--have been carefully lifted
into their final posture of extension upon the Austrian blanket. It is,
of all moments, the one at which interruption is least welcome; nor is
the intruder at all surprised at being greeted by the invalid with a
more than sub-acid accent.
"My dear Jim, _already_! Why you become more _matinale_ every day! you
_are_ the early bird indeed! You do not"--with an annoyed laugh--"give
us poor worms a chance of being beforehand with you."
"I am very sorry if I am too soon," replies he, his eyes wandering away
from the fretful features before him in search of others upon which he
knows he shall find written no complaint of his prematureness--"but I
came to----Where's Amelia?"
"You may well ask," replies Sybilla, with a sort of hysterical laugh.
"It is pretty evident that she is not _here_! My dear Cis, would you
mind remembering that my head is not made of mahogany? you gave it such
a bang with that cushion. I am very sorry to trouble you. The heaviest
load a sick person has to bear is the feeling that she is such a burden
to those around her; and certainly, my dear, you do not help me to
forget it."
"Where is she?" repeats Burgoyne hastily, both because he wants to know,
and because he is anxious to strangle in its infancy one of those
ignoble family bickerings, to assist at many of which has been the
privilege or penalty of his state of intimacy.
"She is not well," replies Cecilia shortly, her rosy face rosier than
usual, either with the joy of imminent battle, or with the exertion of
swaddling, under protest, the invalid's now elevated legs.
"Not well! Amelia not well," echoes he, in a tone of incredulity.
During all the years of their acquaintance not once has he heard his
patient sweetheart complain of ache or pain. Manlike, he has therefore
concluded that she can never have felt either.
"It is very thoughtless of her," says Cecilia, with a not altogether
amiable laugh, and giving a final irritated slap to Sybilla's
coverlet--"considering how much illness we already have in the house;
ha! ha! but it is true all the same: she is not well, not at all well;
she is in bed."
"_In bed!_"
"She must have caught a chill yesterday on that disgusting excursion;
driving home that long distance in wet shoes and stockings."
"But I thought, I hoped that--I asked her to change them."
"She had them dried in a sort of way; but I could see when she put them
on again that they were really wringing wet still. I told her so, but
she only answered that even if they were, what matter? she never caught
cold. You know that Amelia never thinks that anything matters that
concerns herself."
This would be an even handsomer tribute to Amelia than it is, if it did
not suggest a secondary intention of administering a back-hander to
someone else.
"In the case of my children," says Mr. Wilson, making his voice heard
for the first time from the window, where he is discontentedly peering
up and down the sheets of a journal through his spectacles, "there seems
to be no mean possible between senseless rashness and preposterous
self-indulgence."
Mr. Wilson likes his eldest daughter. He is uneasy and upset, and rather
angry at her indisposition, and this is his way of showing his paternal
tenderness.
"_In bed!_"
The human animal is the most adaptive of created beings; but even it
requires some little time to adjust itself to entirely new conditions of
existence.
"Amelia," continues Mr. Wilson, fanning the flame of his ire with the
bellows of his own rhetoric, "is the one among you whom I did credit
with the possession of a head upon her shoulders, and now here she is
wantonly laying herself up!"
"You talk as if she did it on purpose, father," says Cecilia, with an
indignant laugh--"as if she enjoyed it. I do not think that anyone, even
Sybilla"--with a resentful side-glance at the sofa--"could enjoy having
her teeth chattering with cold, her head as heavy as lead, and her knees
knocking together under her."
"Good heavens!" cries Jim, his bewildered surprise swallowed up in
genuine alarm; "you do not mean to say that she is as bad as that?"
Sybilla laughs, and even in the midst of his real anxiety, Burgoyne has
time for the reflection that the Wilson family seem this morning to have
_se donne le mot_ to show in how many different styles it is possible to
be merry without the least tinge of genuine mirth in any.
"My dear Jim, have not you known Cis long enough not to take her _au
pied de la lettre_? Do not you know of old what a magnificent colourist
she is?--a perfect Tintoret! Of course Amelia is not quite the thing,
poor dear--she has no one but herself to blame for that!--but equally of
course, to a colossally healthy person such as she, any little ailment
appears a mountain."
This speech is uttered with the accent of such entire conviction that it
ought to carry reassurance into the heart of the person to whom it is
addressed. Sybilla really and honestly disbelieves in the reality of any
claims but her own to sincere sickness. But Jim unreasonably neither is
nor feigns to be reassured.
"You have had advice for her? You have sent for Dr. Coldstream?" he asks
rapidly of the two sound members of the family, turning his back
unceremoniously upon the invalid.
"I was going to send for him at once," answers Cecilia, her own latent
anxiety quickened by the evident alarm of her interlocutor, "but Sybilla
said it was needless, as in any case he was coming to see her this
afternoon."
"I think he wishes to change my medicine," puts in Sybilla in a piano
voice, that shows an evident desire to assert her threatened position of
prime and only genuine invalid, a sort of "beware of imitations" tone;
"he is not quite satisfied with the effect of the last, I think; it has
not brought up the pulse and quickened the appetite in the way he hoped.
I thought that he might run up and look at Amelia at the end of his
visit to me."
"And is it possible," inquires Jim, with some heat, "that you are going
to let half a day go by without doing anything for her? I suppose you
have not exaggerated, have you?" turning with an earnest appeal in his
eyes to Cecilia; "but in any case I am very sure that nothing short of
being really and gravely ill would have kept her in bed--she who is
always waiting hand and foot upon us all, whom we all allow to spend her
life in hewing wood and drawing water for us."
"Send for Dr. Coldstream at once," says Mr. Wilson irritably; "at once,
I tell you; he is so very seldom out of the house that I have often
thought of suggesting to him to take a room here; and now, on the only
occasion on which he is really needed, he is not at hand."
"If you will write the note," says Jim, a shade relieved at having at
last succeeded in rousing Amelia's relations to prompt action, and
feeling a feverish desire to be doing something, "I will take it at
once; it will be the quickest way; I may catch him before he goes out
and bring him back with me."
"Do you really think it is necessary?" asks Sybilla, as Jim hustles
Cecilia to her writing-table, and stands, nervously fidgeting beside her
as she writes; "do you think, if it is only a common cold, as I suspect,
that it is quite fair to worry a man who is so run off his legs already?
He will probably laugh in your face; still, if you are so set upon it,
it is perhaps more satisfactory."
"You need not go into details--just a line--make haste!" cries Jim,
hanging tiresomely over Cecilia, rather impeding her than the reverse by
his impatience, and leaving entirely unnoticed Sybilla's observation,
which indeed has been uttered more to preserve her own self-respect than
with much hope that in the present wrong-headed state of mind of her
family any member will pay much heed to it.
In five minutes more, Jim, with Cecilia's note in his pocket, is being
borne rapidly in a fiacre through the sweet, gay streets. But, drive as
rapidly as he may, he is not quick enough to intercept the popular
English doctor, who, although, as his servant tantalizingly informs Jim,
he is almost always at home at that hour, has, on this occasion, been
sent for to an urgent case of sudden illness out of Florence, at the
village of Peretola. Jim has to content himself with the assurance that
immediately on his return the note will be given him; and with this
unsatisfactory intelligence Mr. Burgoyne reappears at the
Anglo-Americain. He finds the three persons whom he had left much as he
had quitted them--uneasy, cross, and unemployed.
"It is all the fault of that odious expedition yesterday," says Cecilia,
harking back to her old cry. "Why we set out at all, I can't imagine; on
such a day, it was madness, and----"
"It is not much use thinking of that now," interrupts Burgoyne
impatiently, and wincing at these philippics against his poor bride's
miserable treat as if they had been directed against herself.
"Well, it is an ill-wind that blows nobody any good," pursues the young
lady. "I suppose that two of us enjoyed it enough to make up for the
wretchedness of the other four."
Her large prominent eyes are fixed upon Jim as she speaks with a sort of
knowingness overlying their former lugubrious expression.
"Do you mean Mr. Byng and Miss Le Marchant?" inquires he, pronouncing
both names with a laboured distinctness, while his voice sounds to
himself loud and wooden. "You are perfectly right in your conjecture; no
doubt they enjoyed themselves. Byng wished me to tell you that they are
engaged to be married."
If the essence of a good piece of news is to surprise, Jim can certainly
not flatter himself that his comes under that head.
"It did not require a conjurer to prophesy that," is Cecilia's comment.
"I never saw two people who troubled themselves less to disguise their
feelings. I saw that they neither of them knew whether they were on
their heads or on their heels, when they emerged dripping from that
horrid pine wood. Dear me!"--with a good-sized sigh--"how smoothly
things run for some people! how easily some of these affairs come off,
without a hitch anywhere from beginning to end!"
She pauses, and it is plain to those acquainted with her heart history
that her thoughts are coursing mournfully back to the all-along
reluctant and ultimately entirely faithless clergyman who had last
possessed her young affections.
"Without a hitch from beginning to end?" cries Jim hotly, jarred more
than he would like to own to himself by this phrase. "How can you
possibly tell? These are early days to assert that so dogmatically.
"'There's many a slip
'Twixt the cup and the lip.'"
"Do you mean to say that you think it will not come off?" asks Cecilia,
a slightly pleasurable light coming into her eyes as she asks--not that
she has any ill-will towards Elizabeth, nor any distinct design of her
own upon Byng; but that there is something not absolutely disagreeable
to her in the idea of his being still among the ranks of the possible.
"I am sure he would make a delightful husband," puts in Sybilla, her
praise given emphasis by her desire to employ it as a weapon of offence
against one who is at present more deeply than usual in her black books;
"he has such gentle, feminine ways; he comes into a room so quietly, and
when he asks one how one is really listens for the answer."
"Perhaps you are right, and it will fall through," says Cecilia
thoughtfully; "many engagements do!" (sighing again). "She is a sweet,
pretty creature, and looks as if butter would not melt in her mouth; but
she is evidently older than he."
"Jim will not allow that to be an objection," cries Sybilla, with a
faint laugh, "will you, Jim? How much older than you is Amelia? I always
forget."
"I never can help thinking that she has a history," resumes Cecilia, in
a meditative voice, "and that Mr. Greenock knows it. If ever her name is
mentioned he always begins to look wise, as if there were something that
he was longing to tell one about her; it is continually on the tip of
his tongue--some day it will tumble over the tip."
"I do not think that there is any use in my staying all this while!"
cries Jim, jumping up. "Dr. Coldstream cannot be here at soonest for
another hour; and I do not think that we are, any of us, very good
company for each other to-day, so I will look in again later."
He is out of the room and out of the hotel before his companions can
take exception to his disappearance. For some time he walks along
aimlessly, his mind a jumble of misery, and dull, remorseful anxiety
about Amelia; intolerable comparisons between his own lot and his
friend's; sharp knives of jealousy as often as--which is almost
unintermittently--his imagination wings its cruel way to the Piazza
d'Azeglio--through one opulent week, _his_ Piazza. At this moment--this
moment, while his own leaden feet are treading goalless the hot flags
that for him lead nowhere--Byng is enthroned with _her_ in the heaven of
the mean little _salon_. He unconsciously shows his teeth in a stern
smile to the surprised passers-by. He had jeered Byng for his
hyperboles, and now he is _out-hyperboling_ him. What a detestable verb
he has invented! He laughs out loud. Are they sitting at the window,
looking out at the judas tree and the Paulownia? Not they! The window is
commanded to a certain extent by the roadway. The window is for
acquaintances, banal acquaintances, like himself--no place for the
permitted freedoms of exquisite new love. Are they then on the sofa, the
vulgar walnut sofa, over which Elizabeth has thrown her blue Neapolitan
tablecloth? It is a little sofa, scarcely room for two upon it, but, oh!
plenty of room for them! Or are they at the piano? Is she singing him
some sugared ditty "lovely well" until he breaks into her song with the
storm of his kisses, and her little white hands drop from the keys, and
they lie sobbing with ecstasy in each other's arms? It is quite certain
that Byng will sob. He is always delighted at having an opportunity for
turning on the water-works. Is there a bare possibility that Mrs. Le
Marchant may carry her disapprobation to the pitch of impeding by her
presence their _tete-a-tete_? The idea gives him a momentary
alleviation. Why should not he go and see for himself whether it is so?
It will be a method of passing the tedious interval before he can hear
the doctor's verdict on Amelia. He must at some time or other comply
with Byng's pressing prayer to him to offer his congratulations to
Elizabeth, and he may as well have a day of complete and perfect
pain--pain of various flavours and essences mixed into one consummate
draught--a day of which not one hour shall be without its ache.
Having come to this conclusion, his aimless walk quickens, and changes
into a purposeful striding through streets and Piazzas, till he finds
himself standing at the door of 12_a_. He looks up at the _entresol_
windows--they are all open, but no one is either sitting in or looking
out at them. It is as he had thought. The window is too public for them;
neither can they be at the piano, for not a sound of either voice or
instrument is wafted down to him. He runs up the stone stairs, and rings
the electric bell. The standing before the unopened portal, and the
trembling jar of the bell, bring back to him, with a vividness he could
do without, those other long-ago days--they seem to him long ago--when
he stood there last, with no easy heart even then, but yet with how
different anticipations. He has found it hard enough to bear the brunt
of Byng's furious inhuman joy when alone with him. How will he stand it
when he sees them together?
He is recalled from these reflections by the opening of the door, and
the appearance in it of the ministering angel who has usually admitted
him into his Eden--Annunziata. It strikes him that Annunziata looks
older and more dishevelled than ever, and is without that benevolent
smile of welcoming radiance which her hard-featured face generally
wears. Nor does she, as has been her wont, stand back to let him pass in
almost before he has put his question, as if she could not admit him
quickly enough. But to-day she stands, on the contrary, in the doorway
without a smile. In a second the idea flashes across Jim's mind that
Byng has forbidden anyone to be let in. It turns him half sick for the
moment, and it is with an unsteady voice that he stammers:
"The Signora? The Signorina?"
Annunziata lifts her shoulders in a dismal shrug, and stretches out her
hands:
"Gone!"
"_Gone?_ You mean gone out driving?" Then remembering that her English
is as minus a quantity as his Italian, he adds in eager explanation, "En
fiacre?"
She shakes her head, and then nods vaguely in the direction of the whole
of the rest of the world--the whole, that is, that is not 12 bis.
"No, _gone_!"
"But _where_? _Dove?_" cries he, frantic with irritation at his own
powerlessness either to understand or be understood.
Again she shakes her head.
"I do not know; they did not say."
He gathers this to be her meaning, and hurriedly puts another query.
"When? _Quando?_"
But her answer being longer and more voluble, he can't take in its
drift, seeing which she retreats a step, and, motioning him with her
hand to enter, points down the passage. He does not require to have the
dumb-show of invitation twice repeated, but, rushing past her, hurries
down the well-known little corridor to the _salon_ door. It is open, and
he stands within. At the first glance it seems to him to wear much its
usual air. There is even a score of music standing on the piano, the
copper pots are full of rose-branches, and the _scaldini_ brimming with
Firenze's own lilies, the bit of red Venetian brocade, with the little
old tinsel fringe, still hangs over the arm-chair by the fireplace, and
the blue Neapolitan table-cover still disguises the vulgarity of the
sofa. He has misunderstood Annunziata--it is really monstrous to be so
helplessly ignorant of the language of the country you are living in--or
she has lost her wits, or----He had thought the room empty, but as he
advances a step further into it, he discovers that he is not the sole
occupant: that lying stretched upon the floor, with his fair head buried
in a little pillow, against which both men have often seen Elizabeth's
small white cheek resting, is Byng!--the Byng whose riotous, insolent
happiness he had doubted his own powers of witnessing without murdering
him!--the splendid felicity of whose lot he has been so bitterly laying
beside his own destiny--the Byng whom he had been gnashing his teeth at
the thought of--at the thought of him lying in Elizabeth's arms!