So that night Jim does not see Amelia. After all, as Cecilia says, it is
better to be on the safe side, and to-morrow she will be brighter, and
he can sit by her, and tell her lovingly--oh very lovingly!--what a
fright she has given him. Yes, to-morrow she will be brighter. The
adjective is Cecilia's; but, apparently, he cannot improve upon it, for
he not only keeps repeating it to himself as he runs downstairs, but
employs it for the reassurance of Miss Wilson's anxious relatives.
"She will be brighter to-morrow; sick people are always worse at night,
are not they?"--rather vaguely, with again that oppressive sense of his
own inexperience in illness. "Not that she is _worse_"--this is hastily
subjoined, as he sees her father's face fall--"Cecilia never said she
was _worse_--oh, no, not _worse_, only not distinctly better; and, after
all, it would have been irrational to expect that. She will be brighter
to-morrow--oh, yes, of course she will be brighter to-morrow!"
He leaves the hotel with the phrase, which sounds cut and dried and
unreal, still upon his lips, after bidding a kinder good-night than
usual to Mr. Wilson, after having offered to supply Amelia's place by
reading aloud to him, a feat he has not performed since the evening of
his disastrous experience of the Provident Women of Oxford; and lastly,
having even--as a reward to Sybilla, who has been understood to murmur
something tearful about letting her maid look in upon Amelia at
intervals through the night--tucked in her Austrian blanket, and picked
up her smelling-bottle. He has expected to rejoin Byng outside, as he
had promised to wait for him with such patience as a cigar could lend,
and on the condition that his absence should not exceed a stipulated
period. But either the promise has been broken, or the period exceeded,
for Byng is gone. The fact does not greatly surprise Burgoyne, though it
causes him a slight uneasiness, which is, perhaps, rather a blessing for
him, distracting his mind in some slight measure from the heaviness of
his own trouble.
He walks fast to the Piazza d'Azeglio; but he neither overtakes him of
whom he is in pursuit, nor finds him at 12 bis. He has been there, has
inquired with agitation for the telegrams, which have naturally not been
received, and has then gone away again immediately. Whither? The
Padrona, who has answered the door-bell herself and, with Italian
suavity, is doing her best to conceal that she is beginning to
think she has heard nearly enough of the subject, does not know. For a
few moments Jim stands irresolute, then he turns his steps towards the
Arno. It is not yet too late for the charming riverside promenade, the
gay Lung'Arno, to be still alive with _flaneurs_; the stars have lit
their lamps above, and the hotels below. The pale planets, and the
yellow lights from the opposite bank of the river, lie together, sweet
and peaceful upon her breast. In both cases the counterfeits are as
clear and bright as the real luminaries; and it seems as if one had only
to plunge in an arm to pick up stars and candles out of the stream's
depths.
Leaning over the parapet near the Ponte Vecchio, Burgoyne soon discovers
a familiar figure, a figure which starts when he touches its arm.
"I thought I would wait about here for an hour or so," says Byng, with a
rather guilty air of apology, "until I could go back and inquire again.
The telegram has not arrived yet--I suppose it is too early. Of course
they would not telegraph until they get in to-night. You do not
think"--with a look of almost terror--"that they are going through to
England, and that they will not telegraph till they get there?"
"How can I tell?"
"There is nothing in the world less likely," cries Byng feverishly,
irritated at not having drawn forth the reassurance he had hoped for. "I
do not for a moment believe that they have gone home; I feel convinced
that they are still in Italy! Why should they leave it, when they--when
she is so fond of it?"
Jim looks down sadly at the calm, strong stream.
"I do not know, I cannot give an opinion--I have no clue."
"I will ask again in about an hour," says Byng, lifting his arms from
the parapet, "in an hour it is pretty certain to have arrived; and
meanwhile, I thought I would just stroll about the town, but there is no
reason--none at all--why I should keep you! You--you must be wanting to
go back to Amelia."
He glances at his friend in a nervous, sidelong way, as he makes this
suggestion.
"I am not going back again to-night," replies Jim quietly, without
giving any evidence of an intention to acquiesce in his dismissal.
"There is nothing that I can do for her--there is nothing to be done."
His tone, in making this statement, must be yet more dreary than he is
aware, as it arouses even Byng's self-absorbed attention.
"Nothing to be done for her?" he echoes, with a shocked look. "My dear
old chap, you do not mean to say--to imply--"
"I mean to imply nothing," interrupts Jim sharply, in a superstitious
panic of hearing some unfavourable augury as to his betrothed put into
words. "I mean just what I say--neither more nor less; there is nothing
to be done for her to-night, nothing but to let her sleep--a good sleep
will set her up: of course a good sleep will quite set her up."
He speaks almost angrily, as if expecting and challenging contradiction.
But Byng's spirit has already flown back to his own woes. He may make
what sanguine statements he pleases about Amelia's to-morrow, without
fearing any demurrer from his companion. What attention the latter has
to spare is evidently only directed to the solving of the problem, how
best, with amicable civility, to be rid of him. Before he can hit upon
any expedient for attaining this desired end, Burgoyne speaks again, his
eye resting with a compassionate expression upon his junior's face,
whose wild pallor is heightened by the disorder of his hair, and the hat
crushed down over his brows.
"You have not had anything to eat all day--had not you better come back
to the hotel and get something to eat?"
"Eat!" cries the other, with almost a scream; "you must have very little
comprehension of----" Then, checking himself and with a strong and
palpable effort for composure: "It would not be worth while, I should
not have time; in an hour--less than an hour now, for I must have been
here quite ten minutes at the least--I have to return to the Piazza
d'Azeglio."
"Then go to Doney's; why not get something to eat at Doney's? It will
not take you five minutes to reach the Via Tornabuoni."
"What should I do when I got there?" asks Byng impatiently. "If I tried
to swallow food, it would stick in my throat; no food shall pass my lips
till I learn where she is; after that"--breaking out into a noisy
laugh--"you may do what you please with me--we will make a night of it
with all my heart, we will--
"'Drink, drink,
Till the pale stars blink!'"
Jim looks blankly at him. Is he going mad?
"If you think that you will get me to go back to the hotel to-night, you
are very much mistaken," continues Byng recklessly; "no roof less high
than this"--jerking back his head, to throw his fevered look up to the
cool stars--"shall shelter my head; and besides, where would be the use
of going to bed when I should have to be up again so early? I shall be
off by one of the morning expresses: until I have learnt--as, of course,
I shall do to-night--where she has gone, I cannot tell which; but
neither of them starts much later than seven."
For a moment Jim stands dumb with consternation at the announcement of
this intention; but, reflecting that it would not be a whit more
irrational to attempt to reason with a madman who had reached the
padded-room stage of lunacy, than with his present companion, he
contents himself with saying:
"And supposing that you do not learn to-night where she has gone?"
"There is no use in supposing anything so impossible!"
But as the hours go by, the possibility becomes a probability, the
probability a certainty! Midnight comes, and the closed telegraph-office
puts a final extinguisher upon the expectation, which no one but the
unhappy lover had ever entertained, that Florence would be enlightened
before the dawn of another day as to the place whither her two truants
have fled.
Burgoyne has accompanied his friend upon his last importunate visit to
the now-going-to-bed and justly-incensed 12 bis. He has been ashamed
again to present himself at the so-often-attacked door, so has awaited
at the bottom of the stairs, has heard Byng's hoarse query, and the
negative--curter and less suave than the last one--that follows it; has
heard the door shut again, and the hopeless footsteps that come
staggering down to him.
"You will go home now?"
"'Perchance, Iago, I shall ne'er go home!'"
replies Byng; and, though he is compelled to admit that there is no
longer any possibility of his to-night obtaining the information for
which he so madly hungers, that there can consequently be no question of
his setting off by one of the early trains, since he would not know in
which direction to go, and might only be fleeing further from her whom
he would fain rejoin, yet he still keeps with fevered pertinacity to his
project of spending the night _a la belle etoile_.
Finding it impossible to dissuade him, Jim resigns himself to bearing
him company. It is with very little reluctance that he does so. There is
no truer truism than that all sorrows, however mountainous, are more
easily carried under God's high roof than man's low ones, and he who
does not sleep has for compensation that at least he can have no
dreadful waking. So the two men wander about all night in the boon
southern air, and see--
"The moon exactly round,
And all those stars with which the brows of ample heaven are crown'd;
Orion, all the Pleiades, and those seven Atlas got;
The close-beam'd Hyades, the Bear, surnamed the Chariot,
That turns about heaven's axle-tree, holds ope a constant eye
Upon Orion, and of all the cressets in the sky,
His golden forehead never bows to the Ocean's empery."
There are not many hours of a summer's night during which the stir of
life has ceased and has not yet reawaked in an Italian town, the talk
and the tread and the mule bells, and the flutes of the voiceful people
lasting on till near the small hours, and beginning again ere those
hours have had strength to grow big. But yet there is a space of time
when Florence lies silent, baring her beauty to the constellations
alone; and under this unfamiliar and solemn and lovely aspect the two
night-wanderers see her. They see her Campanile
"Commercing with the skies,"
with no distracting human bustle about her feet; they see her Perseus
battling beneath her Loggia, and her San Giorgio standing wakeful at his
post on Or san Michele. They see her scowling palace rows, her stealing
river, and her spanning bridges--palaces out of which no head peeps, a
river on which no boat oars, bridges upon which no horse-hoof rings.
They have all her churches--Santa Croce, Arnolpho's great "Bride," that
_new_ Maria that is now four hundred years old or more, the humbly
glorious San Marco--to themselves; all her treasure houses, all her
memories, all her flower-embalmed air--for a few hours they possess them
all. She is but a little city, this fair Firenze, and in these few hours
they traverse her in her length and breadth, rambling aimlessly wherever
Byng's feverishly miserable impulses lead them. Burgoyne offers no
opposition to any of these, but accompanies his friend silently down
slumbrous thoroughfare, or across sleeping Piazza, by Arno side, under
colonnade or arch. It is all one to him; nor is he sensible of any
fatigue, when at length, at about the hour when Byng had meant to have
caught the early morning train, they return to the hotel, and the
younger man, happily dead-beat at last, worn out with want of food,
tears, and weariness, flings himself down, dressed, upon his bed, and
instantly falls into a leaden sleep. Jim feels no desire, nor indeed any
power of following his example. He is not easily tired, and his former
life of travel and hardship has made him always willing to dispense with
the--to him--unnecessary luxury of a bed; and, under ordinary
circumstances, a night passed in the open air would have had an effect
upon him rather exhilarating than otherwise. He has his bath, dresses,
breakfasts, and then jumps into a fiacre, and has himself driven to the
Anglo-Americain.
The day is so exactly the counterpart of its predecessor, in its even
assured splendour, that Jim has a hazy feeling that they both make only
one divided into two parts by the narrow dark blue ribbon of the
exquisite brief night. When did yesterday end and to-day begin? As he is
borne along, his memory, made more alert by sleeplessness,
reproduces--merely, as it seems to him, the better to fill him with pain
and remorse--the different states of mind in which he has passed over
the often trodden ground. Here, at the street corner, what a nausea had
come over him at the thought of the interest he would have to feign in
those humdrum details, so dear to Amelia's soul, of their future
_menage_, with all its candle-end economies and depressing restrictions.
Here, in the church shadow, how he had tried to lash himself up into a
more probable semblance of pleasure in her expected and dreaded
caresses. There seems to be scarcely an inch of the way where he has not
had some harsh or weary thought of her; he is thankful when the brief
transit, that has appeared to him so long, is over. And yet the change
is only from the sharp sting of recollected unkindness to the dull
bruising ache of anticipated ill. A _garcon_ is sweeping out the
_salon_, for the hour is not much beyond eight, so Jim goes into the
dreary little dining-room, where two places are laid with coffee-cups
and rolls. Only two. And, though he knows that nothing short of a
miracle could have already restored Amelia so completely as to enable
her to come down to breakfast, yet the ocular demonstration of the fact
that her place is and will be empty, strikes a chill to his boding
heart. He is presently joined by Cecilia, whose carelessly-dressed hair,
heavy eyelids, and tired puffy face, sufficiently show that not to her,
any more than to himself has night brought
"Sweet child sleep, the filmy-eyed."
"How fresh and cool you are!" she cries, with an almost reproachful
intonation. "Do not look at me!"--covering her face with her hot
hands--"I am not fit to be seen; but what does that matter? What do I
care?"--beginning to cry--"Oh, she is so bad! We have spent such a
dreadful night! As I tell you, I am a shocking sick-nurse; I never know
what to do; I lose my head completely; and she has been so odd--she has
been talking such gibberish!"
"Delirious?"
"Yes, I suppose that is what you would call it. I never saw anybody
delirious before, so I do not know. I have seen Sybilla in hysterics,
but I never believed that they were real--I always thought that a bucket
of water would bring her round."
As a general rule, Jim may be counted upon for cordial co-operation in
any hit directed against Sybilla, but now he is too spiritless even to
notice it.
"I was so frightened," continues Cecilia; "it is not cheerful being all
alone at the dead of night with a person talking such nonsense as she
was. Amelia, of all people, to talk nonsense! I could not quite make out
what it was about, but it seemed to have more or less reference to you.
She was begging you to forgive her for something she had done, as far as
I could gather; some treat she had prepared for you, and that you had
not liked. Have you the least idea what she could have meant?"
He has every idea; but it would seem profanation to explain that her
poor wandering brain is still distressedly labouring with the abortive
project she had so happily framed for his enjoyment.
"She is quieter now. Sybilla's maid is with her; Sybilla really has not
behaved badly--_for her_; she let her maid look in several times during
the night; but still, for the most part I was alone with her! Oh, I do
trust"--shuddering--"that I may never again have to be alone at night
with a person who is not right in her head!"
This aspiration on the youngest Miss Wilson's part is, for the present
occasion, at least, likely to be gratified; for, by the time that
another night settles down on Florence, Amelia's illness has been
declared by Dr. Coldstream to have every symptom of developing into the
malarious Florentine fever, which not unfrequently lays low the chilled
or over-fatigued, or generally imprudent foreign visitor to that little
Eden. Amelia has Florentine fever; and the verification of this fact is
followed by all the paraphernalia of serious sickness--night and day
nurses, disinfectants, physic phials.
The announcement of her being attacked by a definite and recognised
disease brings at first a sort of relief to Burgoyne's mind, which,
under Cecilia's frightened and frightening word-pictures, had been beset
by terrors great in proportion to their vagueness. Now that Amelia is
confessedly sick of a fever, there is nothing abnormal in her being
"odd," and "stupid," and "wandering," these being only the inevitable
stages on a road which will--which _must_ lead to ultimate recovery. His
heart is heavy, yet scarcely so heavy as it had been upon his arrival in
the morning, when, late in the afternoon--not sooner do the claims upon
him of the disorganized and helpless family of his betrothed relax--he
returns to the Minerva to look after Byng. Having had every reason to
fear that he will not find him at the hotel, but will be obliged again
to set off in pursuit of him through the streets and squares so
repeatedly traversed last night, he is relieved to learn from the hotel
servants that the young man is in his bedroom. He finds him there
indeed; no longer stretched in the blessed oblivion of deep sleep upon
his bed, but sitting on a hard chair by the open window, his arms
resting upon the back, and his face crushed down upon them. By no
slightest movement does he show consciousness of his friend's entrance.
"I am afraid I have been a long time away," says the latter kindly.
"Have you?" answers Byng, his voice coming muffled through lips still
buried in his own coat-sleeve. "I do not know; I have done with time!"
"I do not know how you have managed that," rejoins Jim, still
indulgently, though a shade dryly. "Have you been here all day?"
"I do not know where I have been. Yes,"--lifting his head--"I do; I have
been to the Piazza d'Azeglio."
"Well?"
"They know where she is. They were packing her things; through the door
I saw them tying the label on the box; if I had tried I could have read
the address on the label, but I did not. She had forbidden them to give
it to me; in her telegram she had forbidden them to give it to anyone."