Alas! Part 16

Even as she speaks she makes an uncertain step forward, but it is so uncertain that he catches her by the arm.

"You are not fit to move yet," he says with kind imperativeness; "rest five minutes longer; it is not late, really--the sun is quite high still."

Convinced, either by the young man's eloquence, or, as is more likely, by the shaking of her own limbs, Mrs. Le Marchant sits down again.

Elizabeth has risen to her feet, and now stands beside her mother. She has said nothing, but he can see her trembling from head to heel. He hears her voice now addressing him, but in so subdued a key that her words are almost lost in the low blowing of the faint south wind that is fondling the blades of the unshorn gra.s.s.

"Did you say that he was gone? Are you sure of it?"

"Yes, yes, quite sure! I saw him go."

"Did you--did you happen to hear where he was staying?"

"No, but"--with the greatest eagerness--"I can easily find out; nothing can be simpler."

Elizabeth is standing quite close to him, so close that he can see her poor little heart leaping under the thin white gown, whose simple finery had piqued him earlier in the day. She has apparently, in her new terror, forgotten that there is any cause for concealing from him the occasion of it. She turns instinctively to him, as a hurt child to the nearest bystander. It seems to him the most natural thing in the world that she should. They are both recalled to themselves by her mother's voice.

"You must think that we have lost our wits," she says with a sickly smile; "but even if we have, I do not know what right we have to impose upon a--a comparative stranger like you, the task of helping us to gratify our--our idle curiosity."

"But I am not a comparative stranger!" cries Jim vehemently; by this time--he does not know how--he is holding a hand of each of the trembling women in his. "I am not a stranger at all! I am a friend! Why will not you treat me as one? Why will not you let me help you?"

He glances with pitying, affectionate eagerness from one to other of the woebegone faces on either side of him. The tears have come in sudden flood to the elder woman, and are pouring over her white cheeks, stopping the pa.s.sage of her voice; but Elizabeth's fair eyes are drearily dry, and speech comes clear and hopeless from her.

"You are very good to us!" she says, giving the hand that holds hers a little pressure, which he feels to be as cold as it is grateful; "at least, I see that you want to be very good to us if we would let you; but as to helping us"--with a slight despairing shrug--"no one can do that; no one but G.o.d, and sometimes"--drawing a long, half-sobbing breath--"I think that it would pa.s.s even His power."

CHAPTER XV.

There are few things more difficult than when one's mind is full of the interests, cares, and sorrows of one set of friends, to have to empty it suddenly of them, and refill it as suddenly with the entirely different, and perhaps discrepant interests, cares, and sorrows of an altogether alien set.

Seldom in the course of their old and tried friends.h.i.+p has Jim Burgoyne felt less disposed for the company and conversation of his valued ally, Mrs. Byng, than when he knocks at the door of her sitting-room on the morning following the excursion to Certosa. He cannot talk to her about the Le Marchants, seeing that she has never even heard of their existence; and if out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, his talk upon any other topic must be scant and jejune indeed. The only cheerful side which his prospective visit turns to him is, that if he were not with Mrs. Byng, he would be with Amelia; and that the friendlily indifferent eyes of the former will, at all events, be less likely than the hungrily loving ones of the latter to detect that he has not slept a wink, and that he has not the remotest idea what he is talking about. If he were to follow his inclination, he would be bestowing his company this morning upon neither friend nor sweetheart, but would be ransacking Florence for the piece of information he had yesterday promised those two woebegone women to procure for them. Even into the very midst of his heartfelt sore compa.s.sion for them, there pierces a shamed unwilling flash of elation at the thought of what a stride to intimacy his being entrusted with this commission implies, of what an opening to indefinitely numerous future visits it affords. His determination to conduct the search is at present a good deal more clearly defined than the method in which that search is to be effected.

He can consult _Galignani_ as to the names and whereabouts of new arrivals; but they could do that much for themselves. He could examine the visitors' books of the different hotels; but Florence, though a little city, is rich in hostelries, and this course would take time. He could consult Mr. Greenock, the head and fount of all Florentine gossip, and who, since he had seen him in conversation with the object of his inquiries, would probably be able to satisfy them; but his acquaintance with the good-natured newsmonger is not sufficiently intimate for him to be able to pay him a morning visit with any air of probability of having been impelled thereto by a desire for his company; and, moreover, he shrinks with a morbid fear from any action which may lead, however obliquely, to his being himself apprised of the terrible secret which--it is no longer mere matter of conjecture--lies couched somewhere in those two poor creatures' past.

And meanwhile he knocks at Mrs. Byng's door, and is quickly bidden enter by a cheerful English voice, the welcoming alacrity of whose tones shames his own want of pleasure in the meeting. But he is too unfortunately honest to express a joy he does not experience, and only says, with a slight accent of reproach as he takes her ready hand, heartily held out:

"You should not spring these surprises upon us."

She laughs a little guiltily.

"It--it was a sudden thought; you see I--I had never seen Perugia."

He laughs too. "Poor Perugia! I think it would have blushed unseen for a good many more years if you had not begun to doubt the efficiency of my chaperonage. Confess! you have come to look after the precious baby-boy, have not you?"

His tone is, as he himself feels, not quite a pleasant one; but the mother is scarcely more p.r.o.ne to take offence than the son; and she answers with an amiably hasty disclaimer:

"It was not that I felt the least want of confidence in you--you must not think that; but--but I had one of my presentiments! you know that I am always a little superst.i.tious; and three nights running an owl came and hooted quite close under my window!"

"As long as I have known your wood, it has had owls; and as long as I have known them, they have hooted."

"In the wood, yes, of course, and I like to hear them; but this one was close under my window."

Jim's only answer is to lift his hands and shoulders in protest against his friend's weak-mindedness.

"I had quite made up my mind that something had happened," continues she, not much abashed by his scorn; "and it was the greatest relief when I first caught sight of him at the station yesterday, looking just as usual, a little thinner perhaps--does not he strike you as a little thin? Has he been weighed lately? He gives me the idea of having lost a pound or two since I last saw him. Is there a weighing-machine in the hotel?"

"It will be very easy to ascertain."

"And how is Amelia?"--her cheerful eyes resting in friendly and half-inquisitive interest on his sombre face.

"Amelia is very well, thank you."

"Amelia Wilson still?"

"Yes."

"For how long?"--laughing--"another ten years, I suppose?"

"For three months, I believe; we are to be married as soon as they return to England."

"You do not say so?"--with an accent of lively and delighted incredulity--"hurrah! poor Amelia! '_Tout vient a point a qui sait attendre_;' and she has _su attendre_ with a vengeance, has not she?"

"She is not going to _attendre_ any more," replies Jim dryly.

"Then I shall have to give you a present, I suppose!" cries Mrs. Byng, still with that delighted accent. "Something useful, I have no doubt. I feel sure that Amelia would like something useful; why should not we choose it to-day? Florence is an ideal place for buying presents; do you think that Amelia would spare you to me for a whole morning?"

Jim hesitates. It is not that he has any doubt as to Amelia's cheerful renunciation of any portion of his time that he may see fit to abstract from her; but the occupation suggested--that of squiring Mrs. Byng--is not that to which he had purposed devoting his forenoon. She sees his unreadiness to answer, and attributes it to a wrong cause.

"Amelia will not?" cries she in a tone of surprise and disappointment.

"Well, I could not have believed it of her! Not even if you told her that it is on purpose to buy her a present?"

Jim breaks into an unavoidable smile. "How frightfully quickly your mind moves! It leaps like a kangaroo! I never said that she would not resign the precious boon of my society; on the contrary, I am sure that nothing would give her greater pleasure, but--but--what will w.i.l.l.y say to my monopolizing you?"

At the excessive disingenuousness of this speech his conscience gives him a severe p.r.i.c.k, recalling to his mind the att.i.tude of prostrate affliction--stretched face downwards on his bed--in which his young friend had received the news of his parent's prospective approach. A light cloud pa.s.ses over that parent's sunny face.

"w.i.l.l.y has an engagement this morning," she answers more slowly, and with less radiance than has. .h.i.therto marked her utterances; "nothing could be sweeter and dearer than he was, and he is going to take me somewhere this afternoon--to Fiesole or Petraia, or somewhere else delightful; but this morning he has an engagement. He did not tell me what it was, and I did not like to tease him with questions. You"--with a rather wistful glance of interrogation at her companion--"do not happen to know what it is?"

Jim shakes his head, while a rather deeper shade than habitually lies upon it settles on his careworn forehead. It is perfectly true that he knows nothing of young Byng's engagement, but yet he has a shrewd suspicion to what quarter of the town that engagement will lead him.

"So that I rather counted upon you," continues Mrs. Byng, turning with a somewhat crestfallen air to the window.

"And you did not count in vain," replies Burgoyne, with a sort of forced gallantry. It has flashed upon him that he will have to consent under penalty of giving a detailed account of the reasons for his inability, and that therefore he had better make a virtue of necessity, and do it with a good grace. After all, the deferring for a couple of hours of his researches cannot be of any great consequence to the persons in whose behalf those researches are set on foot. To a suspicious ear there might be something dubious in the sudden and galvanized alacrity of his a.s.sent; but not a shadow of doubt crosses Mrs. Byng's mind as to her old and tried ally being as pleased to avail himself of an opportunity for enjoying her society as he has always showed himself during the twenty years and more of their acquaintance.

Protected by this happy misconception, she sets off, all smiles, though at the outset of the expedition she finds that she has to modify her project; and that Burgoyne shows himself restive as to _bric-a-brac_ shops, and declines peremptorily to be any party to buying himself a wedding present. He puts his objection upon the semi-jocose ground that he shall be unable to avoid overhearing the price of her intended gift, and that his modesty could not stand the strain of helping her to haggle over it. Perhaps, however, deep in his heart is an unconscious feeling that to receive nuptial offerings gives an almost greater body and certainty to his on-striding fate than even the buying of dinner-services and saucepans. So they go to the Accademia delle Belli Arti instead, it having occurred to Jim that in a picture-gallery there will be less opportunity for conversation, less opening for interested inquiries on his companion's part as to Amelia and the minutiae of his future life with her, than there would be in the green walks of the Cascine, or on the slopes of Fiesole.

To Mrs. Byng, who is of almost as enjoying a nature as her son, and whose spirits have been raised to a pitch even higher than their usual one, by the disproof of her presentiments, it is all one where she goes, so that she is taken somewhere, to see something. They stare up at the big young David, and stand before Fra Angelico's ineffably happy Paradiso, which yet brings the tears to the looker's eyes, perhaps out of sheer envy of the little blissful saints dancing and frolicking so gaily, or pacing so softly in the a.s.sured joy of the heavenly country.

They look at Botticelli's "Spring," fantastic wanton, with her wildly-flowered gown, and her lapful of roses. The room in which she and her joyous mates stand, with their odd smiles, is one of the smaller of the gallery. It is rather a narrow one, and has an open window, giving upon a little court, where, in a neglected garden-close, wallflowers are growing, and sending in their familiar perfume. The sweet Francia saints in the picture hung on the wall directly opposite, and the rapt Madonna, must surely smell them. If they do not, it must be because a young couple, he and she, who are leaning out in their eagerness to enjoy it, have intercepted all the homely fragrance. Jim's eyes are still on the "Spring," and he is thinking half absently how little kins.h.i.+p she has with the goitred green women, whom his nineteenth-century disciples present to the confiding British public as representatives of Sandro Botticelli's manner, when his attention is diverted by hearing the voice of Mrs. Byng at his elbow addressing him in an excited tone: