Alas! Part 10

"Did Miss or Mrs. Le Marchant ask you to call?"

Byng laughs.

"Both of them are as innocent of it as the babe unborn!"

"You asked yourself then?" (in a snubbing voice).

Byng nods.

"And she said yes?"

The plural p.r.o.noun has dropped out of sight, but neither of them perceives it. The younger man shakes his sleek head. Jim lays down his paper with an air of decision.

"If she did not say 'Yes'--if she said 'No,'" he begins, with an accent of severity, "I fail to understand----"

"She did not say 'No,'" interrupts Byng, still half laughing, and yet reddening as well. "She began to say it; but I suppose that I looked so broken-hearted--I am sure I felt it--that she stopped."

As Jim makes no rejoinder, he continues by-and-by:

"After all, she can but send me away. One is always being sent away"

(Jim wishes he could think this truer than he does); "but now and again one is not sent, and those are the times that pay for the others! I'll risk it."

There is a hopeful ring in his voice as he ends, and again a pause comes, broken a third time by the younger man.

"Come now, Jim"--looking with a straight and disarming good humour into his friend's overcast countenance--"speak up! Do you know of any cause or impediment why I should not?"

Thus handsomely and fairly appealed to, Burgoyne, who is by nature a just man, begins to put his conscience through her paces as to the real source of his dislike to the idea of his companion's taking advantage of that introduction which he himself has been the means--however unwillingly--of procuring for him. It is true that Byng's mother had adjured him, with tears in her eyes, to preserve her boy from undesirable acquaintances; but can he, Burgoyne, honestly say that he looks upon Elizabeth Le Marchant as an undesirable acquaintance for anyone? The result of his investigations is the discovery of how infinitesimal a share in his motives regard for his young friend's welfare has had. The discovery is no sooner made than he acts upon it.

"My dear boy," he says--and to his credit says it heartily--"I see no earthly reason why you should not go; you could not make nicer friends."

"Then why will not you come too?" asks Byng, with boyish generosity.

The other shakes his head. "They had much rather I stayed away; they have taken me _en grippe_."

"Pooh! Nonsense! You fancy it."

"I think not"--speaking slowly and thoughtfully--"I am not a fanciful person, nor apt to imagine that my acquaintances bother their heads about me one way or another; but when people try their best, in the first instance, to avoid recognising you at all, and on every subsequent occasion endeavour to disappear as soon as you come in sight, it is not a very forced a.s.sumption that they are not exactly greedy for your society."

This reasoning is so close that Byng is for the moment silenced; and it is the other who shortly resumes:

"I think it is because I remind them of the past; they have evidently some unpleasant a.s.sociation of ideas with that past. I wonder what it is."

The latter clause is addressed more to himself than to Byng.

"Perhaps some of them have died, or come to grief, and they are afraid of your asking after them," suggests the younger man.

"On the contrary--they are all--one more flouris.h.i.+ng than another."

"Well, I would give them one more trial, anyhow; I am sure they would come round. Give them time, and I am sure they would come round!" cries Byng sanguinely; adding, "What could have been pleasanter than Mrs. Le Marchant's manner when you presented her to Miss Wilson?"

The mention of Miss Wilson recalls to Jim the extremely unpleasant moment of that presentation, thus brought back to him--the moment when Amelia had looked so middle-aged, and Cecilia so flashy; recalls to him also the conviction that has been growing upon him since yesterday, of the more than wisdom, the absolute imperative duty on his part, of avoiding a repet.i.tion of that comparison which had forced itself upon his notice in the church of San Miniato.

"You had better come," persists Byng still, like a magnanimous child, holding out half his cake to his friend; whether, like the same child, with a semi-hope that it may be refused, or whether, on the other hand, it may have crossed his mind that, where there are two visitees, the chances of a _tete-a-tete_ are improved by there being also two visitors.

"My dear boy," returns Jim, this time with a testiness handsomely streaked with irony, "you are really too obliging; but, even if I wished it--which I do not--or even if _they_ wished it--which they do _not_--it is in this case quite impossible, as I am engaged to go shopping with Amelia."

Probably the blow is not a knockdown one to Byng; at all events, he bears the rebuff with his habitual healthy good temper, and goes off to put on a smarter tie. Burgoyne, thinking no such improvement in his toilette necessary, strolls away to the Anglo-Americain. It is true that he has covenanted to escort Amelia to the shop for Cantagalli ware, though there is no particular reason why, had he so wished it, the purchase of the dinner-service that is to grace their Bayswater symposia might not have been deferred for twenty-four hours; and indeed, as things turn out, it has to be so deferred.

As he opens the door of the Wilson sitting-room his future father-in-law brushes past him, with evident signs of discomposure all over his clerical figure and spectacled face; and, on entering, he finds equal, if not superior, marks of upset equanimity on the countenances of the three women that are the room's occupants. Over the wood fire--Sybilla alternately roasts and freezes her family, and this is one of her roasting days--Cecilia is stooping, in evident search for some object that has been committed, or tried to be committed, to the flames. The other two are looking on with an air of vexed interest. Sybilla is the first to address him.

"You have appeared at a not very happy moment," she says, with a sigh; "we have been having a family breeze; it has sent my temperature up nicely! It is 100, 100, Point 2."

The mention of Sybilla's temperature is always enough to put Jim in a rage. It is therefore in no very feeling tone that he returns:

"If it were 1,000, Point 99, I should not be surprised, in this atmosphere! Good Heavens, Cis, are not you hot enough already?"

The young lady thus apostrophised rises, with some precipitation, and with a very heated complexion, from her knees, holding in her hand, however, the object of her quest--a rather charred small parcel, done up in white paper, and with a fragment of white ribbon still adhering here and there to it.

"Father behaves so childishly," she says, with irritated undutifulness.

"You must own that it was enough to provoke him," strikes in Amelia's mild voice.

"What was enough to provoke him? How has he shown his childishness? For Heaven's sake, some of you explain!" cries Jim impatiently, looking from one to the other.

But with this request none of the three appears in any hurry to comply.

There is a distinct pause before Cecilia, seeing neither of her seniors shows any signs of relieving her of the burden of explanation, takes that burden upon herself.

"The fact is," she says, setting her little rescued packet on the table beside her, and beginning to fan herself, "that Mr. Dashwood, the man to whom I was engaged, has chosen to marry. I am sure"--with a shrug--"no one has the least desire to deny his perfect right to do so; and this morning there arrived by post a bit of his wedding-cake! I suppose he meant it civilly; but father chose to take it as an insult to himself, and though it was addressed to me, he threw it into the fire. I am very fond of wedding-cake; so, as soon as father's back was turned, I fished it out again!"

Jim laughs, with more vigour perhaps than heartfelt amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Bravo, Cis! You are a real philosopher! We might all learn a lesson from you."

"What have you done with your nice friend?" asked Sybilla languidly.

"Amelia, dear, this _couvre-pied_ is slipping off me again. What a sympathetic voice he has! I am sure he has been a great deal with sick people."

"I left him putting on his best tie to go out calling. No, calm yourself, Cecilia, not on you; it is not your turn to-day."

"Whose turn is it then?" asks the girl, with an interest not at all blunted by the mortifying incident of the cake, which, indeed, she has begun to nibble with apparent relish.

Jim hesitates a second--a second during which it strikes him with a shock that he already finds a difficulty in p.r.o.nouncing Elizabeth Le Marchant's name. He manages to evade the necessity even now by a circ.u.mlocution.

"I believe it is the Piazza d'Azeglio upon which that luminary is to s.h.i.+ne."

"Is he going to see that lovely creature to whom you introduced me yesterday?" cries Amelia, with good-natured enthusiasm. "I heard her telling him that she lived in the Piazza d'Azeglio. Oh, Jim, how pretty she is! One ought to pay for being allowed to look at her."

Many women, whose plainness is incontestable, are able to be just to their better favoured sisters; but Amelia is more than just--she is lavishly generous.