Jim refrains from saying how likely this culmination of his friend's
woes has appeared to him, since it would have been the height of the
illogical for the Le Marchants to have put themselves to extreme
inconvenience in order to escape from a person to whom they immediately
afterwards gave the power of following them. He refrains from saying it,
because he knows of how very little consoling power the "told you so"
philosophy is possessed.
"And what will you do now?"
"Do! What is there to do? What does a man do when he is shot through the
heart?"
"I believe that in point of fact he jumps his own height in the air. I
know that a buffalo does," replies Burgoyne with a matter-of-fact
dryness, which proceeds less from want of sympathy, than from an honest
belief that it is the best and kindest method of dealing with Byng's
heroics.
"_Shot through the heart!_" murmurs the latter, repeating his own phrase
as if he found a dismal pleasure in it. "I had always been told that it
was a painless death; I now know to the contrary."
"Shall you stay here? There is no longer any use in your staying here."
"There is no longer any use in my doing anything, or leaving anything
undone.
"'There's nothing in this world can make me joy;
Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.'"
So saying, he replaces his head upon his arms, and his arms upon the
chair-rail, with the air of one who, upon mature consideration, has
decided to maintain that attitude for the remainder of his life.
* * * * *
A week has passed; a week upon which Burgoyne looks back as upon a blur
of wretchedness, with distinct points of pain sticking up here and there
out of it. It is a blur; for it is a time-space, without the usual
limitations and divisions of time; a week not cut up into orderly
lengths of day and night, but in which each has puzzlingly run into and
overlapped each. There have been nights when he has not been in bed at
all, and there have been days when he has slept heavily at unaccustomed
hours. He has not dined at any particular time; he has shared forlorn
breakfast, dotted about the morning as the less or more anxiety about
Amelia dictated, with the Wilsons. He has drunk more tea than he ever
did in his life before, and the result of this whole condition of things
is, that he cannot for the life of him tell whether the day of the week
is Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday, and that he has lost all sense of
proportion. He has not the least idea whether the dreadful moments when
he stood on the landing outside Amelia's door, and heard her
heartrendingly beg him not to go away from her for _quite_ so long, to
be a little gladder to see her when he came back; or again affectingly
assure him that she can do quite well, be quite cheerful without
him--whether, I say, those dreadful moments were really only moments, or
stretched into hours.
Besides the agony of remorse that the impotent listening to those
pathetic prayers and unselfish assurances causes him, he suffers too
from another agony of shame, that the father and sister, standing like
himself with ears stretched at that shut door, should be let into the
long secret of his cruelty and coldness, that secret which for eight
years she has so gallantly been hiding. It is an inexpressible relief to
him that at least the old man's thickened hearing admits but very
imperfectly his daughter's rapid utterances.
"Poor soul! I cannot quite make out what it is all about," he says, with
his hand to his ear; "but I catch your name over and over again, Jim; I
suppose it is all about you."
Cecilia, however, naturally hears as well as he himself does, and
apparently pitying the drawn misery of his face, whispers to him
comfortingly--
"You must not mind, you know it is all nonsense. She talks very
differently when she is well."
The Wilson family have never hitherto shown any very marked affection
for Burgoyne, but now it seems as if they could hardly bear him out of
their sight. They cling to him, not because he is _he_--Jim makes
himself no illusion on that head--but because they have got into such a
habit of leaning, that it is no longer possible to them to stand
upright. He had never realized till now how helpless they are. He had
known that Amelia was the pivot upon which the whole family turned; but
he had not brought home to himself how utterly the machine fell to
pieces when that pivot was withdrawn.
In the course of the past week each member of the family has confided to
him separately how far more she or he misses Amelia, than can be
possible to either of the others. Upon this head Sybilla's lamentations
are the loudest and most frequent. She had at first refused to admit
that there was anything at all the matter with her sister, but has now
fallen into the no less trying opposite extreme of refusing to allow
that there is any possibility of her recovery, talking of her as if she
were almost beyond the reach of human aid. Sybilla's grief for her
sister is perfectly genuine; none the less so that it is complicated by
irritation at her own deposition from her post of first invalid, at
having been compelled to confess the existence in the bosom of her own
family of a traitor, with an indisputably higher temperature and more
wavering pulse than she.
"It is ridiculous to suppose that a person in such rude health as
Cecilia _can_ miss her as I do," she says querulously; "I was always her
first object, she always knew by instinct when I was more suffering than
usual; who cares now"--breaking into a deluge of self-compassionating
tears--"whether I am suffering or not?"
Then, when next he happens to be alone with Cecilia, it is her turn to
assert a superiority of woe; a superiority claimed with still more
emphasis the next half hour by the father. With a patience which would
have surprised those persons who had seen him only in his former
relations with the family of his betrothed he tries to soothe the sorrow
of each--even that of Sybilla--in turn; but to his own heart he says
that not one of their griefs is worthy to be weighed in the balance with
his. In the case of none of theirs is the woof crossed by the hideous
warp of self-reproach that is woven inextricably into his. They have
worked her to death, they have torn her to pieces by their conflicting
claims; their love has been exacting, selfish, inconsiderate; but at
least it has been love; they have prized her at almost her full worth
while they had her. For him it has been reserved as for the base Indian,
to
"Throw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe."
In the intervals--neither long nor many--between his ministrations at
the Anglo-Americain, Burgoyne hurries back to the Minerva to see that
Byng has not blown his brains out. In the present state of mind of that
young gentleman this catastrophe does not appear to be among the least
likely ones. He has refused to leave Florence, always answering the
suggestion with the same question, "Where else should I go?" and if
pressed, adding invariably in the same words as those employed by him on
the first day of his loss, when his friend had urged the advisability of
his removing his countenance from the beaded stool--"Where shall I find
such recent and authentic traces of her as here?"
He passes his time either on the Lung' Arno, staring at the water, or
stretched face downwards upon his bed. He walks about the town most of
the night, and Jim suspects him of beginning to take chloral.
Occasionally he rouses up into a quick and almost passionate sympathy
with his friend's trouble, asking for nothing better than to be sent on
any errand, however trivial, or however tiresome, in Amelia's behalf.
But no sooner have the immediate effects of the appeal to his
kind-heartedness died away, than he sinks back into his lethargy, and
Jim is at once too much occupied and too miserable to use any very
strenuous endeavours to shake him out of it. But yet the consciousness
of the tacit engagement, under which he lies to the young man's mother,
to look after him, coupled with the absolute impossibility, under his
present circumstances, of fulfilling that engagement, and his uneasiness
as to what new form the insanity of Byng's grief may take on, from day
to day, add very perceptibly to the weight of his own already
sufficiently ponderous burden.
It is the ninth day since Amelia fell sick, that ninth day which, in
maladies such as hers, is, or is at least reckoned to be, the crisis and
turning-point of the disease. Jim has been up all night, and has just
rushed back to the Minerva, for the double purpose of taking a bath, and
of casting an uneasy eye upon his charge. He finds the latter not in his
room, but leaning over the little spiky balcony, out of his window,
hanging over it so far, and so absorbedly, that he does not hear his
friend's approach, and starts violently when Jim lays a hand on his
shoulder.
"What are you looking at?"
"I; oh--nothing particular! What should I be looking at? What is there
to look to? I was only--only--wondering as a mere matter of curiosity,
how many feet it is from here to the pavement? Sixteen? eighteen?
twenty?"
Jim's only answer is to look at him sadly and sternly; then he says
coldly:
"I do not recommend it; it would be a clumsy way of doing it."
"What matter how clumsy the way, so that one attains the end?" asks Byng
extravagantly, throwing off even the thin pretence he had at first
assumed; "who cares how bad the road is so that it leads him to the
goal?
"'Oh, amiable lovely death!
Thou odoriferous stench, sound rottenness!'"
Jim shudders. Death has been so near to him for the last nine days, that
the terrific realism of Constance's apostrophe seems to be almost more
than he can bear.
"It is silliness to live when to live is a torment, and then, have we a
prescription to die, when death is our physician?" continues Byng loudly
and wildly, clasping his hands above his head, and apparently perfectly
indifferent as to whether the other inmates of the hotel, or passers-by
on the piazza, overhear him.
"If you stay here much longer you will spare yourself the trouble of
putting an end to your existence," replies Jim, glancing at the other's
head, exposed hatless to the scorch of the Tuscan sun, "for you will
certainly get a sunstroke."
So saying, he takes him quietly, yet decidedly, by the arm, and leads
him within the room. Either his matter-of-fact manner, or the sight of
his face, upon which, well-seasoned as it is, vigil and sorrow have
begun to write their unavoidable marks, brings the young madman back to
some measure of sense and self-control.
"I had no fixed intention," he says apologetically, still looking white
and wild; "you must not think I meant anything; but, even if I had--do
you know--have you ever happened to read anything about the statistics
of suicide? Do you know what an increasing number of people every year
find life intolerable?"
"I know that you are fast making _my_ life intolerable," answers Jim,
fixing his tired, sleepless eyes with melancholy severity upon his
companion. "Amelia is--you are as well aware of it as I am--probably
dying, and yet even now, thanks to you, into my thoughts of her is
continually pushing the fear that I may have to tell your mother that
you have had the colossal selfishness to rush out of the world, because,
for the first time in your pampered life, the toy you cried for has not
been put into your hand."
Burgoyne's hopes have not been high, as to any salutary result of his
own philippic while uttering it. But our words, sometimes, to our
surprise, turn from wooden swords to steel daggers in our hands. For a
moment Byng stands as if stunned; then he breaks into a tornado of sobs
and tears, such tears as have often before angered his friend, but which
now he welcomes the sight of, as perhaps precursors of a saner mood.
"Oh, my dear old chap!" he cries, catching at Jim's unresponsive hand,
and wringing it hard, "she is not dying _really_? You do not mean it?
You are only saying it to frighten me? Oh! dear, kind Amelia. Not dying!
not dying?"
"I do not know: to-day is the turning-point, they say; even now it may
have come."
"And why are not you with her? Why do not you go back to her?" cries
Byng, in a broken voice of passionate excitement, the tears still racing
down his face.
"And leave you to go tomfooling out there again?" asks Jim, with a nod
of his head towards the balcony, seen from where they stand, grilling in
the midday blaze.
The verb employed, if closely looked into, bears a ludicrous
disproportion to the intended action indicated, but neither of the men
sees anything ridiculous in it.
"I will not!" cries Byng, in eager asseveration; "I give you my word of
honour I will not; if you do not believe me, take me with you! Keep me
with you all day! Do you think that I, too, do not want to know how
Amelia is? Do you think that I am indifferent as to whether she lives or
dies? Poor, good Amelia! When I think of that drive to Vallombrosa, only
ten days ago! They two sitting side by side, so happy, laughing and
making friends with each other!"
He covers his face with his hands, and through them the scalding drops
trickle; but only for a moment. In the next, he has dashed them away,
and is moving restlessly about the room, looking for his hat.
"Let us go this instant," he says urgently; "my poor old man, do you
think I would willingly add a feather weight to your burden? I should
never forgive myself if I kept you a second longer from her at such a
time; let us go at once."
Burgoyne complies; but under pretext of making some change in his dress,
escapes from his friend, for just the few minutes necessary to write and
despatch a telegram to the young man's mother. It runs thus:
"_No cause for alarm, but come at once. He is perfectly well, but needs
you._"
If, as is to be hoped, Mrs. Byng is still in London, reaping the
succession of the old relative whose death-bed she had quitted Florence
to attend, his message will bring her hither within forty-eight hours,
and the burden of responsibility, now grown so insupportable, will be
shifted from his shoulders. Until those forty-eight hours have elapsed,
he must not again let Byng out of his sight.
The day rolls by, the critical ninth day rolls by on its torrid wheels
to eventide, and when that eventide comes, it finds Cecilia Wilson
running down from Amelia's room, to give the last news of her to the
three men and one woman waiting below.
"I think he seems quite satisfied," she says, in answer to the silent
hungry looks of question addressed to her, and alluding to the doctor,
who is still with the patient; "the strength is maintained; the
temperature lower." What a dreadful parrot-sound the two phrases, so
familiar to us all in the newspaper bulletins of distinguished men on
their death-beds, have during the last week assumed in Burgoyne's ears;
"you can speak to him yourself when he comes down, of course, Jim; but I
am sure he is satisfied."
"She is better!--she is saved!" cries Byng, rushing forward and
snatching both Cecilia's hands--"do you say that she is really saved?"
"Oh, are you here still, Mr. Byng? how very kind of you!" replies
Cecilia, a tinge of colour rushing over her mealy face--that face, ten
days ago, clothed in so many roses--"well, I am afraid he does not go
quite so far as that, but he says it is as much as we can expect, and
even I can see that she is not nearly so restless."
"Thank God!--thank God!"
In the ardour of his thanksgiving he presses her hands closer, instead
of dropping them, a fact of which he is entirely unaware, but so is not
she; and who knows, even at that serious moment, what tiny genial hope
may slide into her plump heart!
Again this night Burgoyne does not go to bed, from a superstitious fear
that if he does, if he seems to take for granted an improvement, that
very taking for granted may annul it--may bring on a relapse. But when
the next morning finds no such backsliding to have taken place, when
each hour through the cheerfully broadening day brings falling fever and
steadying pulse, then indeed he cautiously opens the door of his heart
to let a tiny rose-pinioned hope creep in--then at last, on the third
night, he stretches his tired limbs in deep slumber upon his bed.
He has received a brief telegram from Mrs. Byng to announce her arrival
as fast as boat and train can bring her; and seven o'clock on Saturday
morning--he having sent his despatch to her on the previous
Wednesday--finds him pacing the platform of the railway-station,
awaiting the incoming of the morning express from Turin. He is pacing it
alone, for he has thought it best not to reveal to her son the fact of
her expected return, not being at all sure in what spirit he will
receive it, nor whether indeed the news of it might not even drive him,
in his present unsound state of mind, to fly from the place at her
approach.
The morning air, in its early clear coolness, blows sweet here, under
the station-roof, unconquered even by engine smoke, and on Jim's face as
he walks up and down--careworn as it still is--there comes, now and
again, a half-born smile. He is never one to hope very easily, but
surely now--now that yet another night has been prosperously tided over,
there can, even to him, seem no reasonable ground for doubt that Amelia
has turned the corner. Amelia, with the corner turned--Byng, in five
minutes wholly off his hands! The only wonder is, that the small smile
never comes quite to the birth.
The train is punctual, and almost at its due moment draws up in dusty
length at the platform. Its passengers are comparatively few; for at
this latening season most of the English are winging home to their rooky
woods; and he has no difficulty in at once discovering among them the
tall smart figure--smart even after forty-eight hours of the unluxurious
luxury of a _wagon-lit_--of the lady he is awaiting. As he gives her his
hand to help her down the high step, the admiring thought crosses his
mind of what a large quantity of fatigue, dust, and uneasiness of mind a
radically good-looking Englishwoman, in radically good clothes, can
undergo without seeming much the worse for them. Before her neat narrow
foot has touched the pavement, a brace of eager questions shoots out of
her mouth.
"Am I in time? Am I too late?"
"In time for _what_? Too late for _what_?"
"Has he--has he done anything--anything irrevocable? Is he--is he? I
suppose that horrid woman has got hold of him? I suppose that is why you
sent for me!"
By this time she is safely landed at his side, which is possibly the
reason why he at once lets fall her hand.
"I am not aware that there is any 'horrid woman' in the case."
"Oh, what does it matter what I call her?" cries the mother, fast
becoming frantic at the delay in answering her passionate questions. "I
will call her what you please; you know perfectly whom I mean; she _has_
got hold of him, I suppose. I always knew she would! Did not I tell you
so? but is it too late? is there no way of getting him off?"
Now that Burgoyne has a nearer view of Mrs. Byng, he sees that she has a
more fagged and travel-worn air than he had at first supposed, and her
dusty eyes are fastened upon him with such a hunger of interrogation,
that, angered and jarred as he is by her tone, he has not the heart any
longer to keep her in suspense.
"If you are alluding to Miss Le Marchant, I may as well tell you at once
that she has left Florence."
"Left Florence! Do you mean to say that she has run away with someone
else?"
She puts the question in all good faith, her lively imagination having
easily made the not very wide jump from the fact already established in
her own mind of Elizabeth being an adventuress, to the not much more
difficult one to swallow, of her having devoured another _fils de
famille_, as well as Mrs. Byng's own.
For a moment, Burgoyne turns away, voice and countenance alike beyond
his control. He has by no means perfectly recovered either, when he
answers--
"Yes, with someone else--she has reached the pitch of turpitude of
leaving Florence with her mother."
"She is gone?" cries Mrs. Byng, with an accent of the highest relief and
joy; "gone away altogether, do you mean?--oh, thank God!"--then, with a
sudden lapse into affright, she adds rapidly--"and he is gone after
her?--he is not here?"
"No, he is here."
"Then why has not he come to meet me?"--suspiciously.
"He did not know you were expected."
"You did not tell him?"
"No."
"Why did not you tell him?"
"I did not know how he would take it."
"Do you mean to say"--falling from her former rapidity of utterance to a
dismayed incredulous slowness--"that he will not be glad to see
me?--that _Willy_ will not be glad to see _me_?"
"I mean to say that I am afraid you will not find him very much in
sympathy with you; I do not think he will find it easy to hear you speak
of Miss Le Marchant in the terms, and make the implication about her
that you did just now," replies Jim, avenging by this sentence the
wrongs done to Elizabeth, and doing it so well, that a moment later a
feeling of compunction comes over him at the success of his own attempt
at retributive justice.
Mrs. Byng turns pale.
"Then she has got hold of him?" she says under her breath.
"Got hold of him?" repeats Jim, his ire aroused again, no sooner than
allayed, by this mode of expression; "you certainly have the most
extraordinary way of misconceiving the situation! _Got hold of him?_
when she had to leave Florence at a moment's notice to escape his
importunities!"
But at this, Mr. Burgoyne's auditor looks so hopelessly bewildered that
he thinks it the simplest plan at once, in the fewest possible words, to
put her in possession of the tale of her son's achievements and
disasters. He does this, partly to stem the torrent of her questions,
the form that they have hitherto taken producing in him a feeling of
frenzied indignation, which he doubts his own power much longer to
conceal--partly in order to set Elizabeth's conduct with the least
possible delay in its true light before her. Surely, when she has been
told of her magnanimous renunciation, she will do her justice, will
cease to load her with those hard names and insulting assertions that
have made him grind his own teeth to listen to. But in this expectation
he soon finds that he is mistaken. The wrath of Mrs. Byng against
Elizabeth for having "drawn in" her son, as she persists in stating the
case, is surpassed only by indignation at her insolence in having
"thrown him over." As to the genuineness of this last action she
expresses, it is true, the most complete incredulity.
"It was only to enhance her own value. Do you suppose that she expected
him to take her at her word? She thought, of course, that he would
follow her--that he would employ detectives--it is a proof"--with an
angry laugh--"that he cannot be quite so bad as you make him out, that
he has not done so."
"I would not put it into his head, if I were you," replies Jim, with an
anger no less real, and a merriment no less spurious than her own.
By this time they have reached the hotel; and Jim, having helped his
companion out of the fiacre, shows symptoms of leaving her.
"Will not you stay to breakfast with me?" she asks, a little aghast at
this unexpected manoeuvre; "I cannot make my toilette till the luggage
arrives: and I suppose that he"--her eyes wandering wistfully over the
hotel front till they rest on her son's closed persiennes--"that he is
not up yet; it would be a sin to wake him; do stay with me."
"I am afraid I cannot."
"Why cannot you?"--with an impatient but friendly little mocking
imitation of his tone. "You are not"--with a conciliatory smile--"angry
with an old hen for standing up for her own chick?"
Jim smiles too.
"I do not think that the old hen need have clucked quite so loudly; but
that is not why I am leaving her; I _must_ go."
"Where _must_ you go?"
"To the Anglo-Americain."
She lifts her eyebrows.
"At this hour--you forget how early it is. Well, Amelia _has_ got you
into good training; but I can assure you that you will still find her in
bed."
He sighs.
"I am afraid that there is not much doubt of that."
"What do you mean?--she is not ill, surely?"--in a tone of lively
surprise--"Amelia ill?--impossible!"
He looks at her with an irrational stupefaction. It appears to him now,
in the distortion of all objects that the last fortnight has brought, as
if Amelia's illness had spread over the whole of his life, as if there
had never been a time when she had not been ill, and yet of this event,
immense as it seems to him in its duration, the woman before him
obviously has never heard. When he comes to think of it, how should she?
In point of fact it is not a fortnight since Miss Wilson fell sick, and
during that fortnight he himself has not written her a line; neither, he
is equally sure, has her son.
"I am evidently very much behind the time," she says, noting the, to
her, unintelligible astonishment in his face; "but you must remember
that I have been kept completely in the dark--has she been ill?"
In answer he tells her, with as much brevity and compression as he had
employed in the tale of Elizabeth's disappearance, that of Amelia's
illness, often interrupted by her expressions of sympathy. At the end
she says:
"I am so thankful I did not hear till she was getting better! It would
have made me so wretched to be such a long way off!"
Her adoption of his trouble as her own, an adoption whose sincerity is
confirmed by her impulsive seizure of his hand, and the feeling look in
her handsome eyes make him forgive the exaggeration of her statement,
and go some way towards replacing her in that position in his esteem
which her diatribes against Elizabeth had gone near to making her
forfeit.
"But it will be all right now," continues she sanguinely; "there will be
nothing to do but to build up her strength again, and she is young--at
least"--as the reminiscence of Amelia's unyouthful appearance evidently
flashes across her mind, of that prematurely middle-aged look which an
unequal fortune gives to some plain women--"at least, young enough for
all practical purposes."
Whether it be due to the possession of this modified form of juvenility,
to an excellent constitution, or to what other reason, certain it is
that the next two days go by without any diminution, rather with a
sensible and steady increase, in Miss Wilson's favourable symptoms, and,
on the afternoon of the latter of these days, Cecilia, in rather
impatient answer to Jim's long daily string of questions about her,
says:
"You could judge much better if you saw her yourself. I do not see why
you should not see her to-morrow for a minute, that is to say, if you
would promise not to talk or ask her any questions."
"But would it be safe?" inquires he, with a tremble in his voice. He
desires passionately to see her; until he does he will never believe
that she is really going to live; he has a hunger to assure himself that
no terrible metamorphosis has passed over her in these nightmare days;
and yet, coupled with that hunger, is a deep dread, which translates
itself into his next halting words.
"Shall I be--shall I be very much shocked? is she--is she very much
changed?"
"She does look pretty bad," replies Cecilia half sadly, yet with the
sub-lying cheerfulness of assured hope; "for one thing she is so wasted.
I suppose that that is what makes her look so much older; but then you
know Amelia never did look young."
It is the second time within two days that the fact of his betrothed's
maturity has been impressed upon him, and formerly it would have caused
him a pang; but now, of what moment is it to him that she looks a
hundred, if only she is living, and going to live?
"Has she--has she asked after me?"
"We do not allow her to speak, but if anyone mentions your name there
comes a sort of smile over her face; such a ridiculous-sized face as it
is now!"
The tears have come into Cecilia's large stupid eyes, and Jim himself
is, with regard to her, in the position of the great Plantagenet, when
he heard the lovely tale of York and Suffolk's high death.
"I blame you not
For hearing this; I must perforce compound
With mistful eyes; or they will issue too!"
As he walks away he is filled with a solemn joy, one of those deep
serious gladnesses with which not the stranger, no, nor even the close
friend or loving kinsman intermeddleth. He is under an engagement to
meet Mrs. Byng at a certain hour, but although that hour has already
come and passed, he feels that he cannot face all her sincere
congratulations without some preparatory toning down of his mood.
The streets, with their gay _va-et-vient_, their cracking whips and
shouting drivers, seem all too secular and every-day to match the
profundity of his reverent thankfulness. He takes it with him into the
great cool church that stands so nigh at hand to his hotel, Santa Maria
Novella. The doors fall behind him noiselessly as he enters, shutting
out the fiery hot piazza, and the garish noises of the world. In the
great dim interior, cold and tranquil, there is the usual sprinkling of
tourists peering up at its soaring columns, trying to read themselves,
out of their guide-books, into a proper admiration for Cimabue's
large-faced Virgin and ugly Bambino, folded, with all its gold and
sombre colours, in the dignity of its twice two centuries of gloom.
There are the usual three or four blue-trousered soldiers strolling
leisurely about, there is a curly-tailed little dog trotting hither and
thither unforbidden, ringing his bell, and there are the invariable
tanned peasant-women kneeling at the side-altars. He does not belong to
the ancient Church, but to-day he kneels beside them, and the tears he
had hastened away to hide from Cecilia come back to make yet dimmer to
his view the details of the dim altar-pieces behind the tall candles.
His eye, as he rises to his feet again, falls on the contadina nearest
him. What is she praying for? In the expansion of his own deep joy he
longs to tell her how much he hopes that, whatever it is, she will
obtain it. It is not the contadina who, standing a little behind, joins
him as he turns away from the altar.
"I saw you go into the church," says Mrs. Byng, her smile growing
somewhat diffident as she sees the solemnity of his face, "so I thought
I would follow you; do you mind? shall I go away?"
He would, of the two, have preferred that she had not followed him, that
he had been given five more minutes to himself; but he naturally does
not say so.
"Since we are here, shall we go into the cloisters?" and he assents.
A small Dominican monk, with a smile and a bunch of keys, is opening a
door to some strangers, prowling like our friends about the church. The
latter follow, the little monk enveloping them too in his civil smile.
Down some steps into the great cloister, under whose arches pale
frescoes cover the ancient walls--where in Florence are there not
frescoes?--and the hands that painted them seem all to have wielded
their brushes in that astounding fifteenth century, which was to
Florence's life what May is to Italy's year. For some moments they stand
silent, side by side, perhaps picking out familiar scenes from among the
sweet faded groups--a slim Rebecca listening to Eliezar's tale, and
looking maiden pleasure at his gifts; a shivering Adam and Eve chased
out of Paradise; an Adam and Eve dismally digging and stitching
respectively; Old Testament stories that time has blurred, that
weather--even in this dry air--has rubbed out and bedimmed, and that
yet, in many cases, still tell their curious faint tale decipherably.
"Good news this evening, I hope?" says Mrs. Byng presently, growing a
little tired of her companion's taciturnity, being indeed always one of
those persons who are of opinion that the gold of which silence is said
to be made has a good deal of alloy in it.
"I am to see her to-morrow."
He speaks almost under his breath, either because he has no great
confidence in his voice, if he employ a higher key, or because there
seems to him a certain sanctity in this promised meeting on the kindly
hither side of the grave which has so lately yawned.
Mrs. Byng is much too old and intimate a friend of Jim's not to have
been pretty well aware of the state of his feelings during the past
eight years, though certainly not through any communication from him. So
it is, perhaps, scarcely to be wondered at that she presently says, in a
tone tinged with admiring surprise:
"How fond you are of her!"
He receives the remark in a jarred silence, his eye resting on the
square of neglected graves in the middle of the cloister, how unlike our
turfy quads and lawns. A commonplace nineteenth century photographer,
with his vulgar camera planted on the time-worn stones, is evidently
trying to persuade the little monk to pose for his picture. The
gentle-looking Fra laughs, and draws up his cowl, then lowers it again,
folding his arms, and trying various postures.
"You are so much fonder of her than you were!"
This speech--though such is certainly far from the good-natured
speaker's intention--stings Burgoyne like a whip-lash.
"I was always fond of her--I always thought her the very best woman in
the world; you know!"--with an accent of almost anguished appeal--"that
I always thought her the very best woman in the world."
"Oh, yes; of course, I know you did," replies she, astonished and
concerned at the evident and extreme distress of his tone. "That is not
quite the same thing as being _fond_ of her, is it? But"--with a laugh
that is at once uneasy and reassuring--"what does that matter _now_?
_Now_ your fondness for her is as indisputable as Tilburina's madness;
and, for my part, I always think people get on quite as well, if not
better, afterwards, if they do not begin quite so volcanically."
But her light and well-meant words fail to remove the painful impression
from her hearer's mind. Has she, during all these years, been crediting
him with a wish for Amelia's death, that she should be so much
astonished at his thankfulness for her being given back to him?
"I believe that this illness is the best thing that could have happened
to you both," continues Mrs. Byng, feeling uncomfortably that she has
not been happy in her choice of a topic, and yet unable to leave it
alone. "It will have drawn you so much together: in fact"--again
laughing nervously--"I think we are all looking up. As I told you, after
the first shock, Willy really was rather glad to see me; and you would
not believe how discreetly I handle the burning subject--yes, everything
is on the mend, and we are all going to have a lovely time, as the
Yankees say!"