The sun rides high, as Burgoyne issues into the open air, and beats,
blinding hot, upon the great stone flags that pave the Florentine
streets, and seem to have a peculiar power of absorbing and retaining
light and heat. He must have been longer in the Piazza d'Azeglio than he
had thought, and the reflection quickens his steps as he hurries,
regardless of the midsummer blaze--for, indeed, it is more than
equivalent to that of our midsummer--back to the Anglo-Americain. As he
reaches it, he hears, with annoyance, the hotel clocks striking one. He
is annoyed, both because the length of his absence seems to argue an
indifference to the tidings he is expecting, and also because he knows
that it is the Wilsons' luncheon hour, and that he will probably find
that they have migrated to the _salle-a-manger_. In this case he will
have to choose between the two equally disagreeable alternatives of
following and watching them at their food, or that of undergoing a
_tete-a-tete_ with Sybilla, who, it is needless to say, does not
accompany her family to the public dining-room; a _tete-a-tete_ with
Sybilla, which is, of all forms of social intercourse, that for which he
has the least relish.
But as he apprehensively opens the _salon_ door, he sees that his fears
are unfounded. They have not yet gone to luncheon; they are all sitting
in much the same attitudes as he had left them, except that Sybilla is
eating or drinking something of a soupy nature out of a cup. There are
very few hours of the day or night in which Sybilla is not eating
something out of a cup. There is that about the entire idleness of the
other couple which gives him a fright. Are they too unhappy? Have they
heard too bad news to be able to settle to any occupation? Urged by this
alarm, his question shoots out, almost before he is inside the door:
"Has not he come yet? Has not the doctor come yet?"
"He has been and gone; you see, you have been such a very long time
away," replies Cecilia. She has no intention of conveying reproach,
either by her words or tone; but to his sore conscience it seems as if
both carried it.
"And what did he say?"
"He did not say much."
"Does he--does he think that it is anything--anything serious?"
"He did not say."
"Do you mean to tell me"--indignantly--"that you did not ask him?"
"If you had been here," replies Cecilia, with a not inexcusable
resentment, "you might have asked him yourself."
"But did not you ask him?" in too real anxiety to be offended at, or
even aware of, her fleer. "Did not he say?"
"I do not think he knew himself."
"But he must have thought--he must have had an opinion!" growing the
more uneasy as there seems no tangible object for his fears to lay hold
of.
"He says it is impossible to judge at so early a stage; it may be a
chill--I told him about that detestable excursion yesterday, and he
considered it quite enough to account for anything--it may be
measles--they seem to be a good deal about; it may be malaria--there is
a good deal of that too."
"And how soon will he know? How soon will it declare itself?"
"I do not know."
"But has he prescribed? Is there nothing to be done--to be done _at
once_?" asks Jim feverishly, chafing at the idea of this inaction, which
seems inevitable, with that helpless feeling which his own entire
ignorance of sickness produces.
"Do not you suppose that if there was we should have done it?" cries
Cecilia, rendered even more uncomfortable than she was before, by the
contagion of his anxiety. "We are to keep her in bed--there is no great
difficulty about that, poor soul; she has not the least desire to get
up; she seems so odd and heavy!"
"So _odd and heavy_?"
"Yes; I went in to see her just now, and she scarcely took any notice of
me; only when I told her that you had been to inquire after her, she lit
up a little. I believe"--with a rather grudging smile--"that if she were
dead, and someone mentioned your name, she would light up."
A sudden mountain rises in Jim's throat.
"If she is not better to-morrow, Dr. Coldstream will send a nurse."
"But does he think it will be necessary?"
"He does not know."
Jim writhes. It seems to him as if he were being blind-folded, and
having his arms tied to his sides by a hundred strong yet invisible
threads.
"Does no one know anything?" he cries miserably.
"I have told you exactly what the doctor said," says Cecilia, with the
venial crossness bred of real anxiety. "I suppose you do not wish me to
invent something that he did not say?"
"Of course not; but I wish I had been here--I wish I had been
here!"--restlessly.
"Why were not you?"
No immediate answer.
"Why were not you?" repeats she, curiosity, for the moment, superseding
her disquiet. "What prevented you? I thought, when you left us, that you
meant to come back at once?"
"So I did, but----"
"But what?"
"I could not; I was with Byng."
"With Byng?" repeats Cecilia, too genuinely astonished to remember even
to prefix a "Mr." to Byng's name. "Why, I should have thought that if
there were one day of his life on which he could have done without you
better than another, it would have been to-day!"
"Were not you rather _de trop_?" chimes in Sybilla's languid voice from
the sofa. "Rather a bad third?"
"I was not a third at all."
"Do you mean to say," cries Cecilia, her countenance tinged with the
pink of a generous indignation, "that you were _four_--that Mrs. Le
Marchant stayed in the room the whole time? I must say that now that
they are really and _bona fide_ engaged, I think she might leave them
alone together."
"Mrs. Le Marchant was not there at all." Then, seeing the open-mouthed
astonishment depicted on the faces of his audience, he braces his mind
to make the inevitable yet dreaded announcement. "I had better explain
at once that neither Mrs. nor Miss Le Marchant was there; they are
gone."
"Gone!"
"Yes; they left Florence at seven o'clock this morning." There is a
moment of silent stupefaction.
"I suppose," says Cecilia, at last slowly recovering the power of
speech, "that they were telegraphed for? Mr. Le Marchant is dead or ill?
one of the married sisters? one of the brothers?"
Never in his life has Jim laboured under so severe a temptation to tell
a lie, were it only the modified falsehood of allowing Cecilia's
hypothesis to pass uncontradicted; but even if he were able for once to
conquer his constitutional incapacity, he knows that in this case it
would be useless. The truth must transpire to-morrow.
"I believe not."
"Gone!" repeats Cecilia, in a still more thunderstruck key than
before--"and where are they gone?"
"I do not know."
"Why did they go?"
Jim makes an impatient movement, fidgeting on his chair. "I can only
tell you their actions; they told me their motives as little as they did
you."
"Gone! Why, they never said a word about it yesterday."
This being of the nature of an assertion--not an interrogation--Jim
feels with relief that it does not demand an answer.
"Gone, at seven o'clock in the morning! Why, they could not have had
time to pack their things!"
"They left them behind."
The moment that this admission is out of Burgoyne's mouth, he repents
having made it; nor does his regret at all diminish under the shower of
ejaculations from both sisters that it calls forth.
"Why, it was a regular flit! they must have taken French leave."
There is something so horribly jarring in the semi-jocosity of the last
phrase that Jim jumps up from his chair and walks towards the window,
where Mr. Wilson is sitting in dismal idleness.
Mr. Wilson has never cared much about the Le Marchants, and is now far
too deeply absorbed in his own trouble to have anything but the most
inattentive indifference to bestow upon the topic which to his daughters
appears so riveting. Jim blesses him for his callousness. But the window
of a small room is not so distant from any other part of it that sounds
cannot, with perfect ease, penetrate thither, as Jim finds when
Cecilia's next eager question pursues him.
"Did Mr. Byng know that they were going?"
"No."
There is a pause.
"It is absolutely incomprehensible!" says Cecilia, with almost a gasp.
"I never saw any one human being so much in love with another as she was
yesterday--there was so little disguise about it, that one was really
quite sorry for her--and this morning at cockcrow she decamps and leaves
him without a word."
"You are mistaken--she left a note for him."
"Poor dear boy!" sighs Sybilla, "is not he quite prostrated by the blow?
I am not apt to pity men generally--they are so coarse-grained--but he
is much more delicately strung than the general run."
"I suppose he is frightfully cut up," says Cecilia, with that
inquisitiveness as to the details of a great affliction which we are all
apt to experience.
For some perverse reason, inexplicable even to himself, Jim would like
to be able to answer that his friend is not cut up at all; but truth
again asserting its empire, he assents laconically, "Frightfully!"
"How did he take it?"
"How do people generally take such things?"
The impatience of the key in which this is uttered, coupled with the
implied side-allusion to an acquaintance with sorrows of a somewhat
similar nature on her own part, silences the younger and sounder Miss
Wilson for a moment, but only for a moment--a moment long enough to be
filled by another sighing "Poor dear boy!" from Sybilla.
"You say that she left a note for him?"--with a renewed light of
curiosity in her eyes--"have you any idea what was in it?"
Jim hesitates; then, "Yes," he replies; "but as it was not addressed to
me, I do not think that I have any right to repeat it."
"Of course not!"--reluctantly; "but did it throw no light--absolutely no
light at all--upon this extraordinary stampede?"
"No."
"Did not she even tell him where they were going?"
"No."
"Nor whether they were coming back?"
"No."
"Nor ask him to follow her?"
"If she did not tell him where she was going, is it likely that she
would ask him to follow her?" cries Jim irritably, deeply annoyed to
find that he is, by the series of negatives that is being forced from
him, doing the very thing which he had just denied his own right to do.
"It is the most incomprehensible thing I ever heard in my life. I
wonder"--with an air of even alerter interest than before--"what Mr.
Greenock will say? Perhaps he will now tell what he knows about them; if
they are gone, there will no longer be any need to conceal it. I am
afraid this looks rather as if there were something!"
For the second time in one day the mention of an amiable _flaneur's_
name makes Jim vault to his feet.
"Well, I will not keep you any longer from your luncheon," he cries
hastily. "I will call in again later."
"Are you going?" asks Mr. Wilson dully, lifting his head from his chest,
upon which it is sunk. "Well, you are about right; we are not much good
to anyone when our mainspring is gone."
The phrase strikes cold on Jim's heart.
"Are you going back to the poor dear boy?" inquires Sybilla as he passes
her. "By-the-bye, if it is not too much trouble, would you mind tucking
the Austrian blanket a little closer in on the left side?" and as he
stoops to perform the asked-for service, she adds: "Let him know how
sincerely I sympathize with him; and if he wants anything quieting for
his nerves, tell him that there is nothing that I can more
conscientiously recommend than----"
But what Sybilla can conscientiously recommend is shut into the closing
door. Outside that door Jim finds that Cecilia has joined him. Anxiety
has quite banished the not altogether disagreeable curiosity of five
minutes ago, from the troubled face she lifts to his.
"You will come back, will not you?" she asks. "You are not of much use,
I suppose; but still, one feels that you are there, and we are all so
much at sea. You have not an idea how much we are at sea--without her."
"I think that I have a very good idea," he answers mournfully. "Tell me,
Cis; do you think she is really very ill?"
As he puts the question, he feels its irrationality. He knows that the
person to whom he is making his futile appeal has already given him all
the scanty tidings she has to give; yet he cannot help indulging a faint
hope that her response to this last query of his may perhaps set
Amelia's condition in a slightly more favourable light. A look of
helpless distress clouds Cecilia's already cloudy face.
"I tell you I do not know; I am no judge; I have seen so little real
illness. Sybilla would kill me if she heard me say so, would not
she"--with a slight parenthetical smile--"but I have seen so little real
illness, that I do not know what things mean; I do not know what it
means that she should be so heavy and stupid. As I told you before, the
only time that she roused up at all was when I mentioned your--"
He stops her, breaking rudely into her sentence. He cannot bear to hear
that it is only at the magic of his name that his poor faithful love
lifts her sick head.
"Yes, yes; I remember."
"Some one ought to sit up with her, I am sure," pursues Cecilia, still
with that same helpless air of disquiet; "she ought not to be left alone
all night; but who? I should be more than willing to do it, but I know
that I should fall asleep in five minutes, and I am such a heavy sleeper
that, when once I am off, there is no possibility of waking me. I am a
dreadfully bad sick-nurse; father can never bear to have me near him
when he has the gout."
Burgoyne is too well aware of the perfect truth of this last statement
to attempt any contradiction of it.
"Amelia has always been the one to sit up when any one was ill,"
continues she woefully; "and even now, by a stupid confusion of ideas, I
catch myself thinking, 'Oh, Amelia will sit up with her!' before I can
realize that _her_ is Amelia herself."
Jim can well sympathize with this same confusion, when, several times
during his walk back to the Piazza d'Azeglio, a muddled thought of
comfort, in the idea that he will go and tell Amelia what a terrible day
of anxiety about some one he has been having, taps at the door of his
brain. The portals of No. 12 are once again opened to him by Annunziata,
who indicates to him, by a series of compassionate gestures and liquid
Tuscan sentences, that the _povero_ is still within, and the Padrona,
who this time also appears on the scene, and who is possessed of
somewhat more English than her handmaid, intimates, albeit with a good
deal of sympathy for his sufferings, yet with still more of
determination, that it would be no bad thing were he to be removed,
since, whether the sun shines or the rain falls, people must live, and
the apartment has to be prepared for new occupants.
Anything that speaks less intention of removing than Byng's pose, when
his friend rejoins him, it would be difficult to imagine. He is
stretched upon the parquet floor, with his head lying on the small
footstool that has been wont to support Elizabeth's feet; her rifled
workbasket stands on the floor beside him, while her bit of embroidery
half shrouds his distorted face. The needle, still sticking in it, may
prick his eyes out for all he cares; the book she last read is open at
the page where she has put her mark of a skein of pale silk; and the
yellow anemones, that he must have plucked for her yesterday in drenched
Vallombrosa, are crushed under his hot cheek. But outwardly he is quite
quiet. Jim puts his hand on his shoulder.
"Come away, there is no use in your staying here any longer."
As he receives no answer, he repeats the exhortation more imperatively,
"Come."
"Why should I come? Where should I come to?" says the young man, lifting
his head, "where can I find such plain traces of her as here? I will
stay."
He says this with an air of resolution, and once more lays down his face
upon the footstool, which, being entirely worked in beads, has impressed
the cheek thrust against it with a design in small hollows, a fact of
which the sufferer is quite unaware.
"You cannot stay!" cries Burgoyne, the more impatiently that his own
share of anxiety is fretting his temper almost past endurance; "you
cannot stay, it is out of the question; they want to come into the
rooms, to prepare them for new occupants."
"_New occupants!_" repeats Byng, turning over almost on his face, and
flattening his nose and lips against the beaded surface of his stool,
"other occupants than _her_. Never! never!"
It is to be placed to the credit side of Mr. Burgoyne's account that he
does not, upon this declaration, withdraw the resting-place from his
young friend's countenance and break it over his head. It is certainly
not the temptation to do so that is lacking. Instead, he sits down at
some distance off, and says quietly:
"I see, you will force them to call in the police. You will make a
discreditable _esclandre_. How good for her; how conducive to her good
name. I congratulate you!"
The other has lifted his head in a moment.
"What do you mean?"
"Do you think," asks Jim indignantly, "that it is ever very advantageous
to a woman to have her name mixed up in a vulgar row? And do you suppose
that hers will be kept out of it? Come"--seeing a look of shocked
consternation breaking over the young man's face, and determined to
strike while the iron is hot--"I will call a fiacre, and we will go home
to the hotel. Put back her things into her basket. What right have you
to meddle with them? You have no business to take advantage of her
absence to do what you would not do if she were here."
Byng obeys with a scared docility; his eyes are so dim, and his fingers
tremble so much, that Jim has to help him in replacing Elizabeth's small
properties. His own heart is pricked with a cruel smart that has no
reference to Amelia's illness, as he handles the departed girl's spools
and skeins, and awkwardly folds her scrap of broidery. Byng offers no
further resistance, and, equally indifferent to his own bunged-up eyes,
bead-marked cheeks, and dishevelled locks, follows his companion dully,
down the stone stairs, compassionately watched from the top by
Annunziata, whose heart is an inconveniently tender one to be matched
with so tough a face. They get into the fiacre, and drive in dead
silence to the Minerva. Arrived there, Jim persuades his friend, who now
seems prepared to acquiesce meekly in whatever he is told to do, to lie
down on his bed, since the few words that he utters convey the fact of
his being suffering from a burning headache, a phenomenon not very
surprising, considering his late briny exercises, since, even at the
superb age of twenty-two, it is difficult to spend six hours in banging
your forehead against a parquet floor, in moaning, bellowing, and
weeping, without leaving some traces of these gymnastics on your
physique.
Burgoyne stands or sits patiently beside him, bathing his fiery temples
with eau-de-Cologne, not teasing him with any questions, having, indeed,
on his own part, the least possible desire for conversation; and so the
heavy hours go by. The day has declined to evening before Burgoyne quits
his _protege's_ side to dine, shortly and solitarily, previous making a
third visit to the Anglo-Americain, to learn the latest news of his
betrothed.
He had left Byng still stretched upon his bed, apparently asleep, and is
therefore the more surprised, on returning to take a final look at him
before setting out on his own errand, to find him up, with hat and stick
in hand, evidently prepared for a walk.
"You are going out?"
"Yes."
"Where are you going?"
The other hesitates.
"I am going back there."
"Impossible!"
"But I am," replies Byng doggedly; "it will not do _her_ any injury, for
I shall not attempt to go in, I shall only ask at the door whether any
telegram has yet been received from--from them; they must telegraph to
direct where their things are to be sent to, and it is most probable
that they have done so already."
"It is most _im_probable."
"Well, at all events, it is possible, it is worth trying, and I mean to
try it."
There is such a fixed resolution in his voice, which is no longer
quavering with sobs, and in his ashy face, that Jim offers no further
resistance. The only concession he can obtain from him is that of
permitting him to accompany him.
"You will not mind coming with me to the Anglo-Americain first, will
you?" inquires Jim, as they set off walking across the Piazza.
"It will delay us quite half-an-hour," answers the other restlessly.
"But stay" (a hazy look of reminiscence dawning over his preoccupied
haggard face), "did you tell me that Amelia was ill--or did I dream it?"
"No, you did not dream it," replies the other sadly. "She _is_ ill."
Perhaps the wretchedness that pierces through his friend's quiet tones
recalls the young dreamer to the fact that the world holds other
miseries than his own. There is at all events something of his old quick
sympathy in his next words, and in the way in which they are uttered:
"Oh, poor Amelia, I _am_ sorry! By all means let us go at once and ask
after her. Is there nothing that we can get?--nothing that we can do for
her?"
It is the question that Jim, in baffled anxiety, puts when he is
admitted inside the dull _salon_, where no love-glorified, homely face
to-night lights up the tender candles of its glad eyes, from over its
stitching, at his entry.
Sybilla is lying less comfortably than usual on her sofa, her cushions
not plumped up, and her bottle of smelling-salts rolled out of her
reach. Mr. Wilson is walking uneasily up and down the room, instead of
sitting placidly in his chair, with the soothing voice--which he had
always thought as much to be counted on, and as little to be
particularly thankful for, as the air that fills his lungs--lullingly
reading him to sleep.
"Cecilia is with her just now," he says, in a voice of forlorn
irritation. "I wish she would come down again; I have no great opinion
of Cecilia as a sick-nurse, and she must know how anxious we are." A
moment later, still pursuing his fidgety ramble from wall to wall, and
exclaiming peevishly, as he stumbles over a footstool: "If it would only
declare itself! There seems to be nothing to lay hold of, we are so
completely in the dark--if it would only declare itself!"
A not very subdued sob from the sofa is the only answer he gets, an
answer which evidently irritates still further his fretted nerves.
"I cannot think what Cecilia is doing!" he cries, hastening to the door,
opening it noisily, and then listening.
"Let me run up and see," says Jim, his heart going out to the fractious
old man in a sympathy of suffering. "Yes, I know where her room is--_au
troisieme_, is not it?" (a flash of recollection lighting up the fact
that Amelia's is distinctly the worst room of the suite occupied by the
Wilson family; the room with most stairs to climb to, and least
accommodation when you reach it). "I will knock quite gently. Do not be
afraid, I will not disturb her, and I will come down immediately to tell
you."
Without waiting for permission, he springs up the stairs, and, standing
on the landing, taps cautiously on the closed door, whose number (by one
of those quirks of memory that furnish all our minds with insignificant
facts) he has recollected. His first knock is so superfluously soft that
it is evidently inaudible within, since no result follows upon it. His
second, a shade louder, though still muffled by the fear of breaking
into some little fitful yet salutary sleep, brings Cecilia out. His
first glance at her face shows him that she has no good news, either to
warm his own heart, or for him to carry down as a solace to the poor old
man below.
"Oh, it is you, is it?" says she, shutting the door behind her with a
clumsy carefulness that makes it creak. "No, I do not think she is any
better; but it is so difficult to tell, I am no judge. She does not
complain of anything particular; but she looks so _odd_."
It is the same adjective that Cecilia had applied earlier in the day to
her sick sister, and it fills Jim with an impotent terror.
"If she is asleep, might not I just look in at her?" he asks. "I do not
know what you mean when you say she looks _odd_."
"She is not asleep," replies Cecilia, in a noisy whisper, much more
likely to pierce sick ears than a voice pitched in its normal key; "at
least, I think not. But I am sure you ought not to see her; Dr.
Coldstream said she was to be kept very quiet, and nothing would upset
her so much as seeing you."
"She need not see me; I would only take just one look at her from behind
the door," persists Jim who feels a desire, whose gnawing intensity
surprises himself, to be assured by the evidence of his own eyes that
his poor love's face has not undergone some strange and gruesome change,
such as is suggested by Cecilia's disquieting epithet.
"Do you think she would not know you were there?" asks she scornfully,
"Why, she hears your step three streets off!"