Alas! Part 19

He hesitates. In his own mind he had planned another disposition of his evening hours to that suggested by her.

"What do you advise?" he asks. "Shall you spend the evening in the usual way?"

"I suppose so," she answers. "I suppose we shall read aloud; you know father likes to make our evenings as like our home ones as possible, and Sybilla----"

"Then it is no use my coming," interrupts he hastily. "I should have no good of you;" then, seeing her face fall at his alacrity in seizing a pretence for escape, he adds, "but, of course, if you wish it, dear--if it would give you any satisfaction----"

"But it would not," cries she precipitately, anxious as usual to be, if possible, beforehand with his lightest wish; "when you are by, I always lose my place"--laughing tremulously--"and father scolds me! No, you had far better not come. I must not be greedy"--in a lower key. "I had quite half an hour, nearly three-quarters, of you this afternoon."

Without trusting herself to any further speech, she disappears, and he, with a sigh that is only half of relief, turns away from the hotel door, and, after a moment's hesitation, a moment's glance at the suave darkening sky, and another at his watch, begins to walk briskly--not in the direction of the Minerva. It is really not late, not much beyond canonical calling hours, and he is almost sure that they dine at eight.

His face is set in the direction of the Piazza d'Azeglio, as he addresses these rea.s.suring remarks to himself. This is no case of self-indulgence, or even of friendly civility. It is a question of common humanity. Why should he leave them to endure their suspense for a whole night longer than they need, merely to save himself the trouble of a walk beneath the darkly splendid sky-arch, through the cheerful streets, still full of leisurely foot-pa.s.sengers, of the sound of cracking whips and rolling carriages?

He reaches No. 12 bis, and finds the porter's wife sitting at the door of her _loge_, and smiling at him with all her white teeth, as if she knew that he had come on some pleasant errand. He climbs the naked stone stairs, and rings the bell. It is answered by Annunziata, who, smiling too, as if she were saying something very agreeable, conveys to him that the signora and the signorina are out.

The intelligence baffles him, as he had not at all expected it. Probably his disconcertment is written not illegibly on his features, as Annunziata begins at once to inform him that the signore are gone to drive in the Cascine, and that she expects them back every moment. It is a good while before he quite masters her glib explanation, his Italian being still at that stage when, if the careful phrase-book question does not receive exactly the phrase-book answer, the questioner is at fault.

But the smiling invitation of the amiable ugly face, and the hospitably open door--so different a reception from what the old bull-dog of an English nurse would have accorded him--need no interpreter. After a moment's hesitation he enters. He will wait for them.

It is not until he has been left alone for a quarter of an hour in the little _salon_ that he has time to ask himself nervously whether the amount of his acquaintance with them, or the importance of the tidings he brings, justifies his thus thrusting himself upon their evening privacy. The table--since they have obviously but one sitting-room--is spread for their simple supper--a coa.r.s.e white cloth, a wicker-covered bottle of rough Chian wine, and a copper pot full of delicately odorous Freesias. He wanders restlessly about the room, looking at the photographs.

Tom--can it be Tom?--with a moustache, Charles with a beard and a bowie-knife, Rose dandling her baby, Miriam hanging over her new husband--all his little playfellows! How far the wave of time has rolled them away from him! He strolls to the window whence, at sunset, the green shutters have been thrown back, and stares out at the Piazza garden, where the twilight is taking all the colour out of the Judas flowers, thence to the piano upon which Schubert's "Trockne Blumen"

stands open. Absently he repeats aloud the song's joyous words:

"Der Lenz wird kommen, der Winter ist aus!"

Is her "Winter aus"? Judging by the look in her eyes, it has been a long and cruel one. If he wishes to put the question to her, she comes in just in time to answer it--enters laggingly, as one tired, blinking a little from the sudden crude lamplight after the soft feather-handed dusk. She is evidently unprepared to find anyone in the room, and gives a frightened jump when she sees a man's figure approaching her. Even when she recognises him the scared look lingers. It is clear that in her sad experience surprises have been always synonymous with bad news. The white apprehension written on her small face makes him so cordially repent of his intrusion, that his explanation of his presence is at first perfectly unintelligible.

"I hope you will excuse my taking such a liberty. I know that I had no business to come in when I was told you were out," he says incoherently, "but--I thought--I hoped--I had an idea--that you might be glad to hear----"

He stops, puzzled how to word his piece of intelligence, whether or not to name the person whose presence, whose very existence had yesterday seemed to inspire with such terror the woman before him. She has sunk down upon a chair, holding her hat, which she had taken off on entering the room, nervously clutched in her hands, the little waves of her hair, straightened out by the night wind, invading her forehead more than their wont and giving her an unfamiliar look.

"To hear what?" asks Mrs. Le Marchant, who, following her daughter more leisurely, has come in just in time to catch the last few words of Burgoyne's speech dissevered from their context. He begins that speech again, still more stammeringly than before.

"I thought you might be glad to hear that the--the inquiries you asked me--I mean that I promised to make--that the person relating to whom I--I made inquiries, leaves Florence to-morrow."

He hears a long sighing breath that may mean relief that may mean only distress at the introduction of the subject, from the chair beside him, while the elder woman says in a low abrupt voice:

"To-morrow? Are you sure? How do you know?"

"He said so himself to-day."

"Have you met him? Have you been talking to him?"

It seems to Jim as if there were a sharp apprehension mixed with the abruptness of her tone, as she puts the two last questions. He makes a gesture of eager denial.

"Heaven forbid! I have taken great care to avoid recalling myself to his memory. I have no desire to renew my acquaintance with him. I--I--hate the sight of him!"

To an uninterested bystander there would have been something ludicrous in the boyish virulence of the expression of hatred coming from so composed and mature a man's mouth as Jim's. But neither of the two persons who now hear it is in a position of mind to see anything ridiculous in it.

"Then how do you know that it is true?"

"He told an--an acquaintance of mine; he was complaining of the discomfort of his hotel, and, on her recommending him to change it, he answered that it was not worth while, as he was leaving Florence to-morrow."

Again from the chair beside him comes that long low sigh. This time there can be no question as to its quality. It is as of a spirit lifting itself from under a leaden load. For a few moments no other sound breaks the stillness. Then Mrs. Le Marchant speaks again in a constrained voice:

"We are extremely obliged to you for having taken so much trouble for us, and it must seem very strange to you that we should be so anxious to hear that this--this person has left Florence; but in so small a place one is sure to be always coming into collision with those whom one would rather avoid, and there are reasons which--which make it very--painful to us to meet him."

So saying, she tums away precipitately, and leaves the room hastily, by another door from that by which they both entered, and which evidently communicates with an adjoining bedroom. Elizabeth remains lying back in her chair, looking as white as the tablecloth. She is always white, but usually it is a creamy white, like meadow-sweet. Out of her eyes, however, has gone the distressed look of fear, and in them is dawning instead a little friendly smile.

"You must have thought us rather impostors when you saw us at the Accademia this morning, after leaving us apparently so shattered overnight," she says, with a somewhat deprecating air.

"I was very glad to find you so perfectly recovered," he replies, but he does not say it naturally. When a person, habitually truthful, slides into a speech not completely true, he does it in a bungling journeyman fas.h.i.+on; nor is Burgoyne any exception to this rule.

"I think we are a little like india-rubber b.a.l.l.s, mammy and I,"

continues Elizabeth; "we have great recovering powers; if we had not"

(stopped for a second by a small patient sigh) "I suppose that we should not be alive now."

He does not interrupt her. She must be a much less finely-strung instrument than he takes her for if she does not divine the sympathy of his silence, and sympathy so much in the dark as to what it sympathizes with as his, must needs walk gropingly, if it would escape gins and pitfalls.

"But we should not have gone out sight-seeing this morning--we were not at all in a junketing mood--if it had not been for Mr. Byng; he came in and took us both by storm. It is difficult," her face dimpling and brightening with a much more confirmed smile than the tiny hovering one which is all that Jim has been able to call forth--"it is difficult to resist a person who brings so much suns.h.i.+ne with him--do not you find it so? He is so very suns.h.i.+ny, your Mr. Byng. We like suns.h.i.+ne; we--we have not had a great deal of it."

It is on the very edge of his lip to tell her that when he had known her she had had and been nothing but suns.h.i.+ne. But he recollects in time her prohibition as to the past, and restrains himself.

"When you look so kind and interested," she cries impulsively, sitting up in her chair, with a transparent little hand on each arm of it, "I feel a fraud."

She stops.

"I look interested because I feel interested," returns he doggedly; "fraud or not--but" (in a distressed voice) "do not, even in joke, call yourself ugly names--fraud or not, you cannot hinder me."

"Do not be interested in me," says she, in her plaintive cooing voice; "we are very bad people to get interested in, we are not repaying people to be interested in. I think--that perhaps" (slowly and dreamily) "under other circ.u.mstances we might have been pleasant enough. Mammy has naturally excellent spirits, and so have I; it does not take much to make us happy, and even now I often feel like poor little Prince Arthur--

"'By my Christendom, So I were out of prison and kept sheep, I should be as merry as the day is long.'

But then," sighing profoundly, "the moment that we begin to feel a little cheerful, something comes and knocks us down again."

There is such a blank hopelessness in the tone with which she p.r.o.nounces the last words, and, in his almost total ignorance of the origin of her despair, it is so impossible to put his compa.s.sion into fit words, that he can think of nothing better than to pull his chair two inches nearer her, to a.s.sure her by this dumb protest of how little inclined he is to accept her warning.

"Are you sure that he is really gone--going, I mean," she asks, in an excited low voice, "going to-morrow morning, as you say? Oh, I wish it were to-morrow morning! But perhaps when to-morrow morning comes, he will have changed his mind. Was he quite, quite sure about it?"

"He said he was going to-morrow morning," replies Jim, repeating Cecilia's quotation from her new friend's conversation with conscientious exactness; "that it was not worth while to change his hotel, as he was leaving Florence to-morrow morning."

"He will not go," she says, shaking her head with restless dejection; "n.o.body but would be loth to leave this heavenly place"--glancing out affectionately through the open window, even at the commonplace and now almost night-shaded Piazza garden--"we shall find that he is not gone after all."

"Nothing will be easier to ascertain than that fact," says Burgoyne, eagerly catching at so easy an opportunity for help and service; "now that I know which is his hotel, I can inquire there to-morrow morning, and bring you word at once."

"Could you, would you?" cries she, life and light springing back into her dejected eyes at his proposal; "but no," with an accent of remorse, "why should you? Why should we keep you running upon our errands? What right have we to take up your time?"

"_My time_," repeats he ironically. "I am like the German Prince mentioned by Heine, who spent his leisure hours--hours of which he had twenty-four every day--in----"