"Cressid, I love thee in so strained a purity,
That the blest gods--as angry at my fancy,
More bright in zeal than the devotion which
Cold lips blow to their deities--take thee from me."
"What does this mean?"
The question has to be twice repeated before the person to whom it is
addressed gives any sign of having heard it. His ears must be so deeply
embedded in the pillow that the passage to his hearing is blocked. It is
not till the interrogation is put a second time, in a louder key, and
accompanied by a not very gentle shake of the shoulder, that he at
length looks up, and reveals what Jim knows to be, and yet has some
difficulty in recognising, as the features of Byng--features so altered,
so distorted, so swollen by excessive weeping, that no one less
intimately acquainted with them than the person who has been already
contemplating them, under the influence of a variety of circumstances
for a couple of months, could possibly put the owner's name to them. Jim
has expected that his young friend would spend some portion of this day
in crying, knowing well both his powers of, and his taste for, "turning
on the water-works," as he but lately cruelly and uncivilly phrased it
to his own mind. But the warm tears of emotion, few and undisfiguring,
with which he had credited him, have not much kinship with the scalding
torrents that have made his handsome young eyes mere red blurs on his
ashen face, that have furrowed his cheeks, and damped his disordered
curls, and taken all the starch out of his immaculate "masher" collar.
They have wetted, too, into a state of almost pulp, a crumpled sheet of
note-paper, which his head seems to have been burrowing in, upon the
pillow.
"What does it mean?" repeats Burgoyne, for the third time, a hideous
fear assailing him, at the sight of the young man's anguish, that he
himself may have mistaken Annunziata's meaning; that her "gone" may have
stood for the final one; that some instant stroke may have snatched
lovely Elizabeth away, out of the world. Surely no catastrophe less than
death can account for such a metamorphosis as that wrought in Byng. "Why
do you look like that?" he goes on, his voice taking that accent of rage
which extreme fear sometimes gives. "Why do not you speak?"
The other, thus adjured, plainly makes a violent effort for
articulation; but his dry throat will let pass nothing but a senseless
sob.
"What does that paper mean?" goes on Burgoyne, realizing the impotence
of his friend to obey his behest, and rendered doubly terrified by it;
"what is it? what does it say? Does it--does it--explain anything?"
He points as he speaks to the blurred and rumpled _billet_, and Byng
catches it up convulsively, and thrusts it into his hand.
"It is the first letter I ever had from her," he says, the words rushing
out broken and scarcely intelligible upon a storm of sobs, and so flings
his head violently down upon the floor again in a new access of furious
weeping.
Burgoyne holds the paper in his fingers, but for a moment or two he is
unable to read it. There is an ugly swimming before his eyes for one
thing; for another, Byng's treatment has not improved it as a specimen
of caligraphy; but it never in its best days could have been a very
legible document. And yet it is not long. Its few words, when at length
he makes them out, ran thus:
"_Good-bye, I was mad yesterday. I shall never marry you; I
have no right to marry anyone. For God's sake do not ask me
what I mean; and oh! don't, don't, DON'T come after me!_"
There is neither date nor signature. As Jim stands staring at the five
crooked, straggling sentences, a great swelling compassion fills his
heart. Did ever poor little scribble make it so easy to construct the
small shaking hand, and the tender breaking heart that penned it? An
immense pity fills his soul; yet does it quite fill it? Is there room
besides, in one corner, for a small pinch of devilish joy?
"There's many a slip
'Twixt the cup and the lip."
His own words of ill-natured croaking, uttered not an hour ago, to
Cecilia Wilson, recur to his mind. How little he thought that that
prophecy would so soon be fulfilled! He remains so long motionless and
silent, his fingers still holding the paper, whose contents he has long
ago mastered, that Byng--the violence of his paroxysm of grief at length
exhausted--struggles to his feet and speaks--speaks as well as the catch
in his sobbing breath and his quivering lips will let him.
"It is not her doing! You may think it is her doing, but I know it is
not! I know her better than you do."
"I never made any pretensions to knowing her well," replies the other
sadly, and relinquishing as he speaks the note to its owner.
"Is it likely, I ask you?" cries Byng excitedly. "I put it to you
fairly: is it likely that she, with her seraph nature, all love and
burning, she that is tender over drowning flies, would have put me to
this horrible pain?--O God, you do not know what pain it is" ["Do not
I?" aside]--"of her own free will?"
"I do not know; as you say, I do not know her well."
"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'"
says Byng, beginning to walk up and down the room with the tears still
rolling down his cheeks, but in his spouting voice--a voice which at
once assures Jim of an amelioration in his friend's condition, and
hardens his heart against him. As a broad rule, indeed, it may be laid
down that that sorrow which courses through one of the numberless
channels cut by the poets for it will not bring its owner to Waterloo
Bridge.
"But what am I saying?" lapsing out of his quotation into broken-hearted
prose again. "It was not she! If I thought it were she, could I live a
moment? It is her mother; no sane person can doubt that it is her
mother's doing! She was always so sweetly docile, and her mother has
conceived some prejudice against me. Did not I tell you how barbarously
she shut the door upon me last night?--shut the door of my heaven in my
face just as I thought I had won the right to enter it. Who would not
have thought that it was won who had seen us together in the wood?"
Jim writhes.
"Oh, never mind the wood now!"
"Someone has prejudiced her against me, but who? I did not know that I
had an enemy in the world. Someone has told her about--about
Oxford--about my being sent down."
Jim is silent.
"If it is only that----" a tearful buoyancy beginning to pierce through
his despair.
"It is not that."
"Someone has put a spoke in my wheel; but who? You are the only person
who could, and you, dear old chap, are the last person who would, though
you were not very encouraging to me last night! _You_ did not?"
There is so direct an interrogation in the last words, accompanied by so
confiding a look of affection, that yet has an uneasy touch of doubt in
it, that Jim is obliged to answer.
"No, I did not put a spoke in your wheel; but"--his honesty forcing the
admission--"I am not at all so sure that I am the last person who would
have done so, if I could."
Byng has wiped his eyes to clear his vision of the blinding tears, and
has again directed them to the note, which he has all this while been
alternately pressing against his heart, laying upon his forehead, and
crushing against his mouth.
"It seems blasphemy to say so of anything that came from her hand," he
says, poring for the hundredth time over each obscure word, "but it
reads like nonsense, does it not? '_I shall never marry you! I have no
right to marry anyone!_' No right? what does she mean?"
Jim shakes his head sadly.
"How can I tell?"
"Do you think it is possible"--lifting his disfigured eyes in horrified
appeal to his friend--"it is a dreadful hypothesis, but I can think of
no other--that that bright intelligence was clouded--that--that her dear
little wits were touched when she wrote this?"
"No, I do not think so."
"You--you are not keeping anything from me?"--coming a step nearer, and
convulsively clutching his friend's arm--"you--you do not know
anything--anything that could throw light upon--upon this? I do not know
whether you are conscious of it, but there is something in your manner
that might lead me to that conclusion. Do you know--have you heard
anything?"
"I know nothing," replies Jim slowly, and looking uncomfortably away
from the questioner, "but I conjecture, I fear, I believe
that--that----"
"That what? For God's sake, be a little quicker!"
"That--that--there is a--a--something in her past."
Byng falls back a pace or two, and puts up his hand to his head.
"What--what do you mean? What are you talking about? Her past?
What"--soaring into extravagance again--"what can there be written on
that white page?--so white that it bedazzles the eyes of even the angels
who read it."
"I do not know what there is," replies Jim miserably, irritated almost
beyond endurance by this poetic flight, and rendered even more wretched
than he was before by the _role_ that seems to be forced upon him, of
conjecturally blackening Elizabeth's character. "How many times must I
tell you that I _know_ no more than you, only from--from various
indications I have been led to believe that she has _something_--some
great sorrow behind her?"
There is a silence, and when it is broken it is infringed by what is not
much more than a whisper.
"What--what do you mean; what--what sort of a sorrow?"
"I tell you, I do not know."
Byng's tears have stopped flowing, and he now lifts his eyes, full of a
madness of exaltation, to the ceiling.
"I will go to her," he cries; "if sorrow has the audacity to approach
her again, it will have to reckon with me. There is no sorrow, none, in
the whole long gamut of woe, for which love such as mine is not a balm.
Reciprocal love!"--trailing the words in a sort of slow rapture--"no one
that had seen her in the wood could have doubted that it _was_
reciprocal."
"No doubt, no doubt."
"I will go to her!"--clasping his hands high in the air--"I will pour
the oil and spikenard of my adoration into her gaping wounds! I will
kiss the rifts together, though they yawn as wide as hell--yes, I will."
"For heaven's sake, do not talk such dreadful gibberish," breaks in Jim,
at length at the end of his patience, which had run quite to the extreme
of its tether indeed at the last mention of that ever-recurring wood.
"It _is_ a knockdown blow for you, I own, and I would do what I could to
help you; but if you will keep on spouting and talking such terrible
bosh----"
"I suppose I am making an ass of myself," replies Byng, thus brought
down with a run from his heroics. "I beg your pardon, I am sure, old
man. I have no right to victimize you," his sweet nature asserting
itself even at this bitter moment; "but you see it is so horribly
sudden. If you had seen her when I parted from her last night at the
door! She lingered a moment behind Mrs. Le Marchant--just a moment, just
time enough to give me one look, one wordless look. She did not speak;
she was so divinely dutiful and submissive that nothing would have
persuaded her by the lightest word to imply any censure of her mother;
but she gave me just a look, which said plainly, 'It is not _my_ fault
that you are turned away! _I_ would have welcomed you in!' Upon that
look I banqueted in heaven all night."
He stops, choked.
"Well?"
"And then this morning, when I got here--I think I ran all the way; I am
sure I did, for I saw people staring at me as I passed--to be met by
Annunziata with the news that they were _gone_! I did not believe her; I
laughed in her face, and then she grew angry, and bid me come in and see
for myself! And I rushed past her, in here, with my arms stretched out,
confident that in one short moment more _she_ would be filling them, and
instead of her"--dropping upon his knees by the table with a groan--"I
find this!"--dashing the note upon the floor--"all that she leaves me to
fill my embrace instead of her is this poor little pillow, that still
seems to keep a faint trace of the perfume of her delicate head!"
He buries his own in it again as he speaks, beginning afresh to sob
loudly.
Jim stands beside him, his mind half full of compassion and half of a
burning exasperation, and his body wholly rigid.
"When did they go? at what hour? last night or this morning?"
"This morning early, quite early."
"They have left all their things behind them"--looking round at the
room, strewn with the traces of recent and refined occupation.
"Yes"--lifting his wet face out of his cushion--"and at first, seeing
everything just as usual, even to her very workbasket--she has left her
very workbasket behind--I was quite reassured. I felt certain that they
could have gone for only a few hours--for the day perhaps; but----"
He breaks off
"Yes?"
"They left word that their things were to be packed and sent after them
to an address they would give."
"And you do not know where they have gone?"
"I know nothing, nothing, only that they are gone.
"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'
Oh! oh!! oh!!!"
"You never heard them speak of their plans, mention any place they
intended to move to on leaving Florence?"
"Never!"
"It is too late for Rome," says Jim musingly; "England? I hardly think
England," recalling Elizabeth's forlorn admission made to him at Monte
Senario, "Why should we go home? We have nothing pleasant to go to."
"I do not think they had any plans," says Byng, speaking in a voice
which is thick with much weeping; "they never seemed to me to have any.
She was so happy here, so gay, there never was anything more lovely than
her gaiety, except--except--her tenderness."
"Yes, yes, no doubt. Then you are absolutely without a clue?"
"Absolutely."
"Do you mean to say that up to yesterday--all through yesterday,
even--she never gave you a hint of any intention of leaving Florence?"
"Never, _never_. On the contrary, in the----" (he is going to say "the
wood," but thinks better of it), "we were planning many more such
expeditions as yesterday's. At least, I was planning them."
"And she assented?"
"She did not _dis_sent. She met me with a look of divine acquiescence."
Jim turns away his head. He is involuntarily picturing to himself what
that look was like, and with what sweet dumb-show it was accompanied.
"What powers of hell"--banging his head down upon the table
again--"could have wrought such a hideous change in so few hours? Only
ten! for it was eight in the evening before I left them, and they were
off at six this morning. They could have seen no one; they had received
no letters, no telegrams, for I inquired of Annunziata, and she assured
me that they had not. Oh no!"--lifting his face with a gleam of moist
hope upon it--"there is only one tenable hypothesis about it--it is not
_her_ doing at all. She wrote this under pressure. It is her
handwriting, is it not?--though I would not swear even to that. I--I
have played the mischief with my eyes"--pulling out his drenched
pocket-handkerchief, and hastily wiping them--"so that I cannot see
properly; but it _is_ hers, is not it?"
"I do not know; I never saw her handwriting; she never wrote to me."
"It was evidently dictated to her," cries Byng, his sanguine nature
taking an upward spring again; "there are clear traces, even in the very
way the letters are formed, of its being written to order reluctantly.
She did it under protest. See how her poor little hand was shaking, and
she was crying all the while, bless her! There, do not you see a blister
on the paper--here on this side?"
Burgoyne does not see any blister, but as he thinks it extremely
probable that there was one, he does not think himself called upon to
wound his friend by saying so.
"I declare I think we have got hold of the right clue at last," cries
Byng, his dimmed eyes emitting such a flash as would have seemed
impossible to them five minutes ago. "Read in this light, it is not
nearly so incomprehensible: '_I shall never marry you, I have no right
to marry anyone._' Of course, I see now! What an ass I was not to see it
at once! What she means is that she has no right to leave her mother! To
anyone who knew her lofty sense of duty as well as I ought to have done
it is quite obvious that that is what she means. Is not it quite
obvious? is not it as clear as the sun in heaven?"
Jim shakes his head.
"I am afraid that it is rather a forced interpretation."
"I do not agree with you," rejoins the other hotly; "I see nothing
forced about it. You do not know as well as I do--how should you?--her
power of delicate, self-sacrificing devotion. It is overstrained, I
grant you; but there it is--she thinks she has no right to leave her
mother now that she is all alone."
"She is not alone; she has her husband."
"I mean now that all her other children are married and scattered. There
are plenty more--are not there?--though I never could get her to talk
about them."
"There are two sisters and two brothers."
"But they are no longer any good to their mother," persists Byng,
clinging to his theory with all the greater tenacity as he sees that it
meets with no very great acceptance in his friend's eyes; "as far as she
is concerned they are non-existent."
"I do not know what right you have to say that."
"And so she, with her lofty idea of self-sacrifice, immolates her own
happiness on the altar of her filial affection. It is just like
her!"--going off into a sort of rapture--"blind mole that I was not to
divine the motive, which her ineffable delicacy forbade her to put into
words. She thought she had a right to think that I should have
comprehended her without words!"
He has talked himself into a condition of such exalted confidence before
he reaches the end of this sentence that Jim is conscious of a certain
brutality in applying to him the douche contained in his next words.
"I do not know why you should credit Mrs. Le Marchant with such colossal
selfishness; she never used to be a selfish woman."
But Burgoyne's cold shower-bath does not appear even to damp the
shoulders for which it is intended.
"'Since you left me, taking no farewell,'"
murmurs Byng, beginning again to tramp up and down the little room, with
head thrown back and clasped hands high lifted; and in his rapt poet
voice:
"'Since you left me, taking no farewell,'
I must follow you, sweet! Despite your prohibition, I must follow you.
"'We two that with so many thousand sighs,
Did buy each other.'"
Then, coming abruptly down to prose--"Though they left no address, it
will of course be possible, easy, to trace them. I will go to the
station and make inquiries. They will have been seen. It is out of the
question that she can have passed unnoticed! No eye that has once been
enriched by the sight of her can have forgotten that heavenly vision. I
will telegraph to Bologna, to Milan, to Venice. Before night I shall
have learnt her whereabouts. I shall be in the train, following her
track. I shall be less than a day behind her. I shall fall at her feet,
I shall----"
"You are talking nonsense," answers Burgoyne impatiently; and yet with a
distinct shade of pity in his voice; "you cannot do anything of the
kind. When the poor woman has given so very unequivocal a proof of her
wish to avoid you, as is implied in leaving the place at a moment's
notice, without giving herself even time to pack her clothes, it is
impossible that you can force your company again upon her--it would be
persecution."
"And do you mean to tell me," asks Byng slowly, and breathing hard,
while the fanatical light dies out of his face, and leaves it chalk
white; "do you mean to say that I am to acquiesce, to sit down with my
hands before me, and submit without a struggle to the loss of----O my
God"--breaking out into an exceeding bitter cry--"why did you make me
"'so rich in having such a jewel,
As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearl,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold,'
if it were only to rob me of her?"
"I do not see what other course is open to you," replies Jim, answering
only the first part of the young sufferer's appeal, and ignoring the
rhetoric, terribly genuine as is the feeling of which it is the florid
expression. "It is evident that she has some cogent reasons--or at least
that appear cogent to her--for breaking off her relations with you."
"What cogent reasons can she have that she had not yesterday?" says Byng
violently--"yesterday, when she lay in my arms, and her lips spoke their
acquiescence in my worship--if not in words, yet oh, far, far more----"
"Why do you reiterate these assertions?" cries Burgoyne sternly, since
to him there seems a certain indecency in--even in the insanity of
loss--dragging to the eye of day the record of such sacred endearments.
"I neither express nor feel any doubt as to the terms you were on
_yesterday_; what I maintain is that _to-day_--I do not pretend to
explain the why--she has changed her mind; it is not"--with a sarcasm,
which he himself at the very moment of uttering it feels to be cheap and
unworthy--"it is not the first time in the world's history that such a
thing has happened. She has changed her mind."
"I do not believe it," cries Byng, his voice rising almost to a shout in
the energy of his negation; "till her own mouth tell me so I will never
believe it. If I thought for a moment that it was true I should rush to
death to deliver me from the intolerable agony of such a thought. You do
not believe it yourself"--lifting his spoilt sunk eyes in an appeal that
is full of pathos to his friend's harsh face. "Think what condemnation
it implies of her--her whom you always affected to like, who thought so
greatly of you--her whose old friend you were--her whom you knew in her
lovely childhood!"
"You are right," replies Jim, looking down, moved and ashamed; "I do not
believe that she has changed her mind. What I do believe is that
yesterday she let herself go; she gave way for one day, only for one
day, after all, poor soul, to that famine for happiness which, I
suppose"--with a sigh and a shrug--"gnaws us all now and then--gave way
to it even to the pitch of forgetting that--that something in her past
of whose nature I am as ignorant as you are, which seems to cast a
blight over all her life."
He pauses; but as his listener only hangs silently on his utterance he
goes on:
"After you left her, recollection came back to her; and because she
could not trust herself again with you, probably for the very reason
that she cared exceedingly about you"--steeling himself to make the
admission--"she felt that there was nothing for it but to go."
Either the increased kindness of his friend's tone, or the conviction
that there is, at least, something of truth in his explanations, lets
loose again the fountain of Byng's tears, and once more he throws his
head down upon his hands and cries extravagantly.
"It is an awful facer for you, I know," says Burgoyne, standing over
him, and, though perfectly dry-eyed, yet probably not very much less
miserable than the young mourner, whose loud weeping fills him with an
almost unbearable and yet compunctious exasperation.
"What is he made of? how can he do it?" are the questions that he keeps
irefully putting to himself; and for fear lest in an access of
uncontrollable irritation he shall ask them out loud, he moves to the
door. At the slight noise he makes in opening it Byng lifts his head.
"Are you going?"
"Yes; if it is any consolation to you, you have not a monopoly of
wretchedness to-day. Things are not looking very bright for me either.
Amelia is ill."
"Amelia," repeats the other, with a hazy look, as if not at first able
to call to mind who Amelia is; then, with a return of consciousness, "Is
Amelia ill? Oh poor Amelia! Amelia was very good to her. Amelia tried to
draw her out. She liked Amelia!"
"Well"--with an impatient sigh--"unfortunately that did not hinder
Amelia from falling ill."
"She is not ill _really_?"--his inborn kind-heartedness struggling for a
moment to make head against the selfishness of his absorption.
"I do not know"--uneasily--"I am going back to the hotel to hear the
doctor's verdict. Will you walk as far as to the Anglo-Americain with
me? There is no use in your staying here."
But at this proposition the lover's sobs break out louder and more
infuriating than ever.
"I will stay here till I die--till I am carried over the threshold that
her cruel feet have crossed.
"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'"
Against a resolution at once so fixed and so rational, Jim sees that it
is useless to contend.