Alas! Part 12

though I never could see that that was quite a necessary alternative!"

Ere the words are out of his mouth she has risen with precipitation, and begun hurriedly to re-arrange the branches of lilac in a scaldino on the table near her. She is apparently so awkward about it that one odorous white bough falls out on the floor. Before Jim can stoop to pick it up, Byng has rushed to the rescue. In eagerly thanking him, in receiving it back from him, and accepting his services in replacing it among its perfumed brothers, the girl, perhaps involuntarily, turns her back upon her former interlocutor, who sits for a moment staring rather blankly at her, and wondering what sting there could have lurked in his apparently harmless words to drive her away so abruptly. Whatever may have driven her away, there is certainly no doubt as to her being gone. Nor as Jim sees her moving about the room, followed by Byng, and showing him her treasures--the little wild red and yellow tulips she plucked in the field this morning; the chicken-skin box she bought at Ciampolini's yesterday, and mixing all that she shows with her delicate light laughter--can he buoy himself up with any reasonable hope of her ever, with her own good will, returning. He must be looking more blank than he is conscious of, for Mrs. Le Marchant's voice sounds quite apologetic in his ears, when, having been, like himself, deserted by her companion, she takes a seat near him.

"Elizabeth is so proud of her bargains," she says, glancing with a lenient smile towards her daughter; "she must show them to everybody."

"She never offered to show them to me," replies Jim, rather morosely; then, becoming aware of the almost puerile jealousy evidenced by his last remark, he adds:

"I am afraid I said something that annoyed Miss Le Marchant; I cannot think what it could have been. I told her how wonderfully little changed I thought her in the last ten years; but it could not have been that, could it?"

The mother's eye is still following her child, and, if it were not an absurd a.s.sumption, Burgoyne could have fancied that there was a sudden moisture in it.

"She is very sensitive," Mrs. Le Marchant answers slowly; "perhaps it would be safer not to say anything about herself to her."

"Perhaps it would be safer," rejoins Jim, with some ill-humour, "if you were to draw up a list of subjects for me to avoid; I have no wish to play the part of bull in a china shop; and yet I seem to be always doing it; imprimis" (striking the forefinger of his left hand with the right), "imprimis the Moat."

He pauses, as if expecting a disclaimer, but none such comes--"The past generally" (moving on to the second finger and again halting; but with no more result than before). "Yourselves" (reaching the third finger).

Still that silence, which, if it mean anything, must mean a.s.sent. He looks impatiently in her face, to seek the response which her lips refuse him.

"On your own showing," she says gently, though in a rather troubled voice, "you have the whole field of the present and the future left you; are not they wide enough for you?"

His brows draw together into a painful frown.

"Perhaps I have as little cause to be fond of them as you have of the past."

It is a random shot, a bow drawn at a venture; but it could not have hit more true apparently had it been levelled with the nicest aim.

As her daughter had done before her, Mrs. Le Marchant rises hastily, and leaves him--leaves him to reflect ironically upon how wisely Amelia had acted in insisting upon his visiting these "dear old friends," upon whom the effect of his conversation is so obviously exhilarating.

"I wish I had not come; I wish it was time to go home!"

The small fractious voice that wails the two preceding sentences seems to be Jim's own mouthpiece. It is, in point of fact, the voice of Bertie, who, tired of uttering his unregarded request for the repet.i.tion of the concert which had filled him with such delight, has of late been trying the effect of his una.s.sisted powers to bring about the desired consummation, by putting his arms as far as he can round the dog's body, and endeavouring to lug him towards the music-stool. The collie has been enduring this treatment for five minutes--enduring it with an expression of magnanimous patience, which seems to say, that, though it is undoubtedly an unpleasant experience, yet, as it is inflicted upon him by one of his own family, he must of course put up with it, when Elizabeth goes to the rescue. Elizabeth goes alone, since Byng is held in converse by her mother at the other side of the room. Verbal persuasions having entirely failed, she tries to loosen the child's arms; but his grasp, though puny, is obstinate, and the only perceptible result of her endeavours is the utterance by her young friend of the two polite aspirations above recorded.

"He does not want to sing any more to-day," Jim hears her saying in her gentle voice; "you really are hurting him; he is too polite to say so; but you are squeezing him so tight that you really _are_ hurting him.

Why now" (with a little accent of pain), "you are hurting _me_."

Jim has been looking with a lack-l.u.s.tre eye out of the open window at the young plane trees exchanging their frowsy buds for infant leaves; at the one Judas tree pranking in its purple blossoms in the Piazza; but at that low complaint he makes one step across the room, and, whipping off Master Bertie alike from long-enduring dog and plaintive woman, stoops over the latter as she sits upon the floor, pa.s.sing one hand over the other, upon which the child's angry fingers, transferred from his first victim, have left rosy prints of pain.

"I wish I had not come; I wish it was time to go home!" whimpers the little boy.

"Since he is so anxious to go home, I will take him, if you like," says Jim in a stiff voice; "I must be going myself."

She looks up at him from her lowly posture, a charming, half-apologetic, wholly peace-making smile fleeting across her small face, while she still chafes her hand--that little pinched hand which makes him feel so ridiculously tender.

"Are you, too, sorry that you came?" she asks.

The question takes him by surprise. He is not prepared for so friendly and almost intimate a sequel to her short, shy answers, and her abrupt quitting of him. He hesitates how to answer it; and as he hesitates, she rises and stands beside him. It is not easy for a grown person to rise gracefully from a seat on the floor. Jim catches himself thinking with what a roll and a flounder Cecilia would have executed the same manoeuvre; but Elizabeth, supple and light, rises as smoothly as an exhalation from a summer meadow.

"If I was rude to you just now," she says, rather tremulously; "if I am ever rude to you in the future, I hope you will understand--I hope you will put it down to the fact that I--I--am very ignorant of--that I know very little of the world."

The two men are gone; so is the child; so is the dog; and Elizabeth is shutting up the piano and removing the score.

"What a noise we made!" she says, smiling at the recollection.

"If you make such a shocking noise again, the signora and the other lodgers will infallibly interfere."

Mrs. Le Marchant has followed her daughter, and now throws one arm about her slight neck, with a gesture of pa.s.sionate affection.

"If you knew," she says, in a voice of deep and happy agitation, "what it was to me to hear you laugh as you did to-day!"

"I have a good many arrears in that way to make up, have not I, mammy?

And so have you too," answers the younger woman, laying her sleek head down caressingly on her mother's shoulder; then, in a changed and restless voice: "Oh, if we could stop that man talking about the Moat!

Why does he go on hammering about it?"

"Why indeed?" replies Mrs. Le Marchant with a shrug. "Men are so thick-skinned; but it is rather touching, his having remembered us all these years, is not it? For my part, I had almost entirely forgotten his existence--had not you?"

"Absolutely!" replies Elizabeth, with emphasis; "and if he will only let me, I am more than willing to forget it over again. Oh, mammy" (turning her face round, and burying it on her mother's breast), "why can't we forget everything? begin everything afresh from now--this delightful _now_?"

CHAPTER XI.

A reconciliation is seldom effected without some price being paid for it. Jim's with Elizabeth, if it can be called such, is bought at the cost of a small sacrifice of principle on his part. No later than this morning he had laid it down as a Median rule that he should avoid opportunities of finding himself in Miss Le Marchant's company; and yet, not only has he spent the major part of the afternoon in her society, but, as he walks away from her door, he finds that he has engaged himself to help Byng, on no distant day, in doing the honours of the Certosa Monastery to her and her mother. On reflection, he cannot quite explain to himself how the arrangement has come about. The proposal certainly did not originate with him, and still less with the two ladies so strangely shy of all society. The three have somehow been swept into it by Byng, who, either with the n.o.blest altruism, or because he feels justly confident that he has no cause for jealousy of his friend (Jim's cynical reflection is that the latter is the much more probable reason), has insisted on drawing him into the project.

Jim Burgoyne is not a man whom, as a rule, it is easy either to wile or cudgel into any course that does not recommend itself to his own judgment or taste--a fact of which he himself is perfectly aware, and which makes him remorsefully acknowledge that there must indeed have been a traitor in the citadel of his own heart before he could have so weakly yielded at the first push to what his reason sincerely disapproves. But yet it is not true that remorse is the leading feature of his thoughts, as he walks silently beside his friend down the Via di Servi. It ought to be, perhaps; but it is not. The picture that holds the foreground of his memory is that of Elizabeth sitting on the floor, and sending him peace-offerings from her pathetic eyes and across her sensitive lips. It was very sweet of her to think it necessary to make him amends at all for her trifling incivility, and nothing could be sweeter than the manner of it. How gladly would he buy some little rudeness from her every day at such a price! But yet, as he thinks it over, the manner of it, the ground on which she rested her excuse, is surely a strange one. That she should attribute her light lapse from courtesy to want of knowledge of the world comes strangely from the mouth of a woman of six-and-twenty. If it be true--and there was a nave veracity in lip and eye as she spoke--how is it to be accounted for? Has her mind, has her experience of life, remained absolutely stationary during the last ten years? Her tell-tale face, over which some pensive story is so plainly written, forbids the inference. It is no business of his, of course. Amelia, thank Heaven! has no story; but, oh! if someone would tell him what that history is! And yet, three days later, he voluntarily puts away from himself the opportunity of hearing it.

During those three days he sees no more of her. He does not again seek her out, and accident does not throw her in his way. He buys his Cantagalli dinner-service in company with Amelia; chooses the soup-tureen out of which he is to ladle mutton broth for the inhabitants of Westbourne Grove; he tastes of the wedding-cake that has cost Cecilia so dear, and he avoids Byng. On the third day he can no longer avoid him, since he is to occupy, as on the San Miniato occasion, the fourth seat in the fiacre which conveys himself and the Misses Wilson to the garden-party at the villa in Bellosguardo inhabited by Mrs. Roche, the mother of the amiable Bertie. The Wilsons' acquaintances in Florence are few, and, as far as Burgoyne has at present had the opportunity of judging, evil. It is, therefore, with a proportionate elation that Cecilia dresses for a party at which she will meet the bulk, or at least the cream, of the English society. It is to Byng's good nature that she and her sister owe the introduction to a hostess whose acquaintance is already too large to make her eager for any causeless addition to it; but whose hand has been forced by Byng, in the mistaken idea that he is doing a service to his friend Jim.

They are late in setting off, as Amelia is delayed by the necessity of soothing Sybilla, who has been reduced to bitter tears by a _tete-a-tete_ with her father, in which that well-intentioned but incautious gentleman has been betrayed into suggesting to her that she may possibly be suffering from biliousness. The administering of bromide, to calm her nerves under such a shock; the reiterated a.s.surances that every member of the family except its head realizes the monstrosity of the suggestion, take up so much time that Amelia herself has to reduce to a minimum the moments allotted to her own toilette. She has cried a little with Sybilla, for company partly, and partly out of weariness of spirit. That and hurry have swollen her eyelids, and painted her cheeks with a hard, tired red, so that it is an even more homespun figure and a homelier face than usual, that seat themselves opposite Burgoyne, when at length they get under weigh.

He, Burgoyne, has been impatient of the delay, impatient to set off and to arrive; yet he would be puzzled to say why. He knows, on no less authority than her own word, that he shall not meet Elizabeth; and yet the mere feeling that the mistress of the house to which he is going is of the same blood as she; that he shall see the rude, spoilt child, whose ill-tempered pinch made her utter that low cry of pain, suffice to give a tartness to his tone, as he inquires the cause of her lagging, of the panting, flushed, apologetic Amelia. Byng and Cecilia have been sitting waiting for some time in the _salon_, from which Sybilla has removed her prostrate figure and tear-stained face; but they have been entertaining each other so well--she in paying him a series of marked attentions, and he in civilly and pleasantly accepting them--that the half-hour has not seemed long to either. But the party, in motion at last, has pa.s.sed the Roman Gate, and is climbing up and up between the high walls, each step giving it a greater vantage ground over the Flower City, before Burgoyne recovers his equanimity.

The spring comes on apace. In the gardens above their heads laurestinus bushes, with all their flowers out (as they are never seen in England, where always the east wind nips half the little round buds before they can expand into blossom), stand in white and green; rosemary trees, covered with gray bloom, hang down; and against the azure of the high heaven purple irides stand up arow. It is one of those days on which one can with bodily eyes see the Great Mother at her quickening work; can see her flus.h.i.+ng the apple-boughs, unfolding the fig-leaves, and driving the l.u.s.ty green blood through the sappy vines. And in the slow creeping of the fiacre up the twisting white road, each turn lays the divine Tuscan city before them in some new aspect of arresting loveliness.

At Florence, one is like Balaam with the Israelites. One is taken to see her from one point after another, each point seeming fairer than the last; but the likeness ends there, for no wish to curse the sweet town could ever arise in even the morosest heart. The hills have put on their summer look of dreamy warmth and distance. Before they have reached the hilltop the boon Italian air has kissed most of the creases out of Jim's temper, and the brick-red from Amelia's cheek-bones. He looks remorsefully from the triumphant beauty around, into the poor, fond face opposite to him--looks at her with a sort of compa.s.sion for being so unlovely, mixed with a compunctious admiration and tenderness for her gentle qualities. He may touch her hand without fear of observation, so wholly is Byng enveloped in the mantle of Cecilia's voluble tenderness.

"Have you forgiven me?" he asks, smiling; "I will make any apologies, eat any dirt, say anything, short of allowing that Sybilla is not bilious."

They have reached the villa, and turned out of the dusty highway into a great cool courtyard, that has a Moorish look, with its high arches, over which the Banksia roses tumble in cascades of yellow and white. It seems wrong that the voices which come from the tea-tables under the Loggia should be chattering English or Yankee, instead of cooing that "sweet b.a.s.t.a.r.d Latin" that better suits place and day.

The hostess shakes hands absently with Burgoyne, offers his fair charges iced coffee, and then, having discharged her conscience towards them, draws Byng away for an intimate chat. From her hands he pa.s.ses into those of several other willing matrons and maids, and it seems likely that the party who brought him will see him no more. Amelia, unused to, and unexpectant of attention, is perfectly content to sit silent, sipping her cold coffee; but Cecilia is champing her bit in a way which frightens her future brother-in-law so much that he cowardly takes the opportunity of her looking in another direction to lure his docile _fiancee_ on to the broad terrace, whence all the young green glory of the Arno's plain, and the empurpled slopes and dreamful breast of Morello, are to be seen by the looker's beauty-drunk eye. Upon this terrace many people are walking and sitting in twos and threes, and in one of the little groups Amelia presently discovers a female acquaintance, who at once fastens upon her, and happening to be afflicted with a relative visited by a disorder of something the same nature as Sybilla's, subjects her to a searching and exhaustive catechism as to the nature of her sister's symptoms. Sybilla's symptoms, whether at first or second hand, have invariably the property of driving Jim into desert places; and, in the present instance, seeing no likelihood of an end to the relation of them, he turns impatiently away, and, without much thought of where he is going, follows a steep downward path that ends in a descent of old stone steps, between whose crevices green plants and little hawkweed blow-b.a.l.l.s flourish undisturbed, to a large square well, framed by a low broad parapet, with flower-beds set around it, and the whole closed in by rugged stone walls. No one apparently has had the same impulse as he, for, at first, he has the cool solitude to himself. He sits down on the parapet of the still well, and drops in pebbles to see how deep the water is; and anon lifts his idle look to the empty niches in the crumbling wall--niches where once wood-G.o.d, or water-nymph, or rural Pan stood in stone, now empty and forsaken. Out of the wall two ilexes grow, and lift themselves against the sapphire arch, which yet is no sapphire, nor of any name that belongs to cold stone; a blue by which all other blues are but feeble colourless ghosts of that divinest tint.

He is roused from the vague reverie into which the cool silence and the brooding beauty around have lulled him, by the sound of approaching voices. He is not to have his well any longer to himself. He looks up with that scarcely latent hostility in his eye with which one regards the sudden intruder into a railway carriage, when--counting on keeping it to one's self for a long night journey--one has diffused limbs and parcels over its whole area. The owners of the voices, having descended, as he had done, the age-worn steps, come into sight. They are both men, and one of them he recognises at once as a Mr. Greenock, a well-known stock figure in Florentine society, a mature bachelor diner-out, a not ill-natured retailer of news, collector of _bons-mots_, and harmless appendage of pretty women. Of the other, at whom he scarcely glances, all he grasps is the fact that he is dressed in clerical attire, and that the first words audible of his speech, as he comes within hearing, is the name of an English county--Devons.h.i.+re. The answer comes in a tone of keen interest:

"Ah, I thought there must be a screw loose!"