Alas! Part 11

Burgoyne rewards her with an affectionate look--a look such as would make her swear that, beside Miss Le Marchant, as beside Dumain's fair love,

"Juno but an Ethiop were!"

"She looks as if she had had a history; that always improves a woman's appearance," says Cecilia pensively, holding a fragment of the fateful cake suspended in air, and regarding it with a melancholy eye. "Has she?"

"I never asked her."

"Why did not you go too?" inquires Amelia, judiciously striking in, as is her habit, as often as she perceives that her younger sister is beginning to get too obviously upon her own _fiance's_ nerves; a catastrophe which something in the tone of his last remark tells her--though she does not quite understand why it should--is imminent.

"They are old friends of yours, are not they? They may be hurt if they find that a perfect stranger like Mr. Byng is in a greater hurry to visit them than you are."

Before Burgoyne's mental vision rises a picture of Elizabeth's heavenly eye wandering indifferently over the dear old friend's shoulder to find its home in that of the perfect stranger. But he says kindly, and even playfully:

"Why did not I go too? Because I was under the impression that I was engaged to go with another lovely being to choose crockery, was I not?

Am I not?"

Amelia's answer is conveyed by a series of nods and winks executed behind her sisters' backs, which he presently understands to imply that she desires a private interview. It is not immediately that he grasps what she is driving at, since dumb-show is often puzzling to the person at whom it is aimed, though clear as day to the dumb-shower. As soon, however, as he masters what her wish is, he hastens to comply with it; and five minutes later finds them _tete-a-tete_ in the hideous little dining-room which had been the scene of their reunion, and of many after-meetings.

"I could not say so, of course, before _her_," remarks Miss Wilson, as soon as they are out of earshot, "or she might have insisted upon my going. She is very unselfish sometimes; but the fact is, I do not think I ought to leave Sybilla again to-day. You see, she was alone the whole of yesterday afternoon; and when we came back we found her in a very low way. She had been reading her book of prescriptions--you know the book; all the prescriptions which she has had for the last ten years bound up together--and we rather dread her bringing it out, as she always fancies that she is going to have the disease prescribed for."

"Humph!"

"And, after all, happiness ought not to make one selfish, ought it?"

says Amelia, with a gentle sigh of abnegation, as she ruffles her pale-haired head against his coat-sleeve. "I have so much of you now--oh, so much!--not to speak of----"

"Cecilia, of course, is incapacitated by grief?" interrupts Jim brusquely. "She will be going up and down upon the mountains like another unfortunate fair one. But your father? He will be at home, will he not?"

"Yes, he will be at home," replies Amelia, slowly and doubtfully, as if not finding a very satisfactory solution in this suggested arrangement; "but, as you know, it never answers to leave father and Sybilla alone together for long. You see, he does not believe that there is anything the matter with her; he thinks that she is as well as you or I" (a gush of warm feeling towards his father-in-law rushes over Jim's heart); "and though he tries to prevent himself from showing it to her, yet I am afraid, poor dear, that he is not very successful."

Jim laughs.

"And to-day," continues Amelia, "he is naturally a good deal upset about Cecilia and that wedding-cake; it _was_ very impertinent to send it--was not it?--though she does not seem to see it. I hope"--with a wistful smile, and a repet.i.tion of the fond friction of her head against his sleeve--"that when _you_ throw _me_ over----"

This is a hypothesis, suggested with perhaps unwise frequency by poor Miss Wilson, which never fails to exasperate Jim.

"If we are going to talk nonsense," he breaks in brusquely, and with no attempt to return or reward her caressing gesture, "I may as well go."

"Go to the Piazza d'Azeglio," says she coaxingly, her spirits raised by the harshness of tone of his interruption of her speech, and half persuading herself that it owes its birth to the supposition being too painful to be faced by him.

He looks at her strangely for a moment, then--"Why do you wish me to go to the Piazza d'Azeglio?" he asks, in a tone that is no longer overtly cross, only constrained and odd. "Why are you driving me there?"

"Because I think you would like it," she answers; "because"--taking his hand and pa.s.sing her lips, which he feels to be trembling a little, very gently over the back of it--"because all through your life I want you to have exactly what you like, always."

He draws his hand away; not unkindly, but as if shocked at the humility of her action.

"That is so likely," he says mournfully.

CHAPTER X.

There is no particular mirth in Burgoyne's mind as he mounts the stone stairs of the house which announces itself as 12 bis, in the commonplace new square of the Piazza d'Azeglio. But yet it is evident that, if he wishes to be in tune with the mood of the family to whom he is going to pay his respects, he must be not only mirthful, but musical. As the door of the _entresol_, to which he is directed by the porter, opens in answer to his ring, bursts of laughter, among which he can plainly detect the voice of Byng, a.s.sail his ear, mingled with music, or rather noise of a sort, but what sort his ear, without fuller evidence than is yet before it, is unable to decide. The person who has admitted him is an elderly Englishwoman, whose features at once strike him as familiar--so familiar that it needs scarcely one reaching back of memory's hand to capture the fact of her having filled the office of nurse at the Moat, at the period when the nursery there had been the scene of those frantic romps in which he himself had taken a prominent part, and in which Elizabeth had been to him by turns so able a second, or so vigorous an adversary. He would like to claim acquaintance with her, and, perhaps, if she had made any difficulty as to admitting him, might have screwed up his courage to do so; but as she lets him in without delay or hesitation, he follows her in silence along the pa.s.sage of a by no means imposing little _entresol_--they are not so well off as they used to be, is his pa.s.sing thought--is ushered into a small sitting-room, and, entering behind his own name, which has been completely drowned by the din issuing from within, has time, before the consciousness of his own appearance has disturbed it, to take in the details of a group which his entry naturally breaks up. Set slantwise across one angle of the room is an open cottage-piano, and beside it stands Elizabeth, her elbow resting on the top, and all her pensive face convulsed with helpless laughter. Upon the music-stool is seated a large collie dog, supported from behind in an upright position by Byng. Before him is a score of music, from which he is obviously supposed to be playing, as indeed he is doing in a sense--that is to say, he is bringing down first one large paw and then another heavily on the keys, accompanying each crash with a short howl to express the agony inflicted upon his nerves by his own performance. The scene is so entirely different a one from what he had expected: the immoderately laughing Elizabeth has so much more kins.h.i.+p with the sweet hoyden of the Moat than with the pale woman with a history of his two last meetings, that for a second or two Burgoyne stands in the doorway as if stunned. It is not till Mrs. Le Marchant, coming out of an inner room, advances to greet him, that he recovers himself.

"How do you do?" she says, smiling, and with less constraint than he has of late learnt to expect. "Are you fond of music?" (putting, as she speaks, her hands up to her ears). "I hope so! Did you ever hear such a shocking noise?"

"I do not know which I admire most, the vocal or the instrumental part of the performance," replies he, laughing; but even as he speaks both cease.

Elizabeth lifts her elbow from the piano, and Byng removes his hands from under the dog's arms, who at once, joyful and released, jumps down, upsetting his music-stool with the impetus of his descent, and yet immediately, with all a dog's real good-heartedness, begins to swing a handsome tail, to show that he bears no real malice for the odious practical joke that has been played upon him. The clamorous fall of dog and music-stool reveals an object which had been hidden behind both, in the shape of a little boy, in whose behalf, as it darts across Jim's mind, the eccentric concert, for which he has come in, must have been got up.

"Oh, _do_ go on!" cries the child shrilly. "Oh, _do_ make him do it again! Oh, why do you stop?"

And indeed through the whole of the ensuing conversation this cry recurs at short intervals with the iteration of a guinea-hen. But none of the three performers seems disposed to comply with this request. Two of them sit down decorously on chairs, and the third throws himself upon the floor panting, showing a fine red tongue, and dragging himself luxuriously along on his stomach to show his relief at his _corvee_ being ended. The child has followed Elizabeth, and now stands beside her, tiresomely pulling at her white hands.

"Bertie has come to spend the day with us," she says, looking explanatorily up at Jim, but speaking with a formality very different, as he feels, from the exuberant ease and mirth that had marked her intercourse with Byng.

Jim had already had a flash of speculation about the child, as to whether he might be a late-come little brother, arrived on the scene at a period subsequent to his own connection with the family; since plainly the span of his small life did not stretch to a decade.

"Bertie is a new friend," he says kindly. "I do not know Bertie."

"His mother, Mrs. Roche, is a cousin of ours; she has a villa on Bellosguardo. Perhaps you know her?"

"I am going to a party at her house on Wednesday," cries Jim, in a tone of eager pleasure at the discovery of this fresh link, and of the vista of probable meetings which it opens up. "I shall meet you there?"

Elizabeth turns her head slightly aside and shakes it as slightly.

"No?"

"We are not going out."

The formula implies mourning, and yet the clothes both of Elizabeth and her mother are unmistakably coloured ones, and give no indication of an even moderately recent loss. But it is so clear that Miss Le Marchant means to add no explanation that he has to change the subject.

"Though Bertie is not an old friend," he says, smiling, "yet I have come across one here to-day--she opened the door to me; I should have liked to shake hands with her, only she looked so haughty--she never used to look haughty at the Moat."

"Do you mean nurse?" she asks.

"Yes, I knew her in an instant; she is not in the least changed, less even"--hesitating a little, as if doubtful whether the stiffness of their new relations warranted a personality--"less even than you."

She s.n.a.t.c.hes a hasty look at him, a look upon which he sees, to his surprise, imprinted a character of almost fear.

"You must be laughing at me," she says, in a voice in which he detects an undoubted tremor; "I am very much changed."

There is such obvious apprehension in her whole manner, that his one thought--after a first flash of astonishment--is to rea.s.sure her.

"Of course I was only speaking of externals," he says quickly; "ten years could hardly be expected to leave any of us quite where we were as to our inner selves;" then, seeing her still look flurried, and becoming himself nervous, he adds, rather stupidly, the hackneyed Swinburnian couplet--

"'Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives!'