Alas! Part 22

"What a bad conscience you must have! Did you think that I was a bailiff?" cries Mrs. Byng, laughing.

"Where is Amelia?" he asks, rather curtly, the memory of Byng's communication about his mother being too fresh in his mind to make it possible for him to answer her in her own rallying key. "What have you done with Amelia?"

"What a 'Stand-and-deliver' tone!" says she, laughing still, but looking not unnaturally surprised. "Well, where is she?" glancing round. "She was here five minutes ago with w.i.l.l.y. Poor Amelia!" lowering her voice to a more confidential key. "I am so glad you have come at last; she is patience personified. I must congratulate you upon the excellent training into which you have got her, but I think that she was beginning to look a little anxious."

"And _I_ think that you have been giving the reins to your imagination, as usual," replies he, walking off in a huff.

There is another delightful garden at the back of the villa, and there, having failed to find her in the first, he now with growing irritation at her for not being more immediately conspicuous, seeks Amelia. It is a sheltered leisurely paradise, where white rose-trees, with millions of bursting buds, are careering over the walls in leafy luxuriance, where double wallflowers--b.l.o.o.d.y warriors, one should call them, if one could connect any warlike idea with this Eden of scented peace--stocks in fragrant row are flowering as we Britons never see them flower in our chary isle, save in the plates of a Gardeners' Chronicle. But among them he finds no trace of his homely English blossom. He finds, indeed, him who had been named as her late companion, Byng; but it is not with Amelia, but with one of the pretty young daughters of the house that he is pacing the straight walk in lively dialogue. Jim accosts him formally:

"I understood that Miss Wilson was with you? Do you happen to know where she is?"

Byng stops short in his leisurely pacing.

"Why, where is she?" he says, looking round, as his mother had done, but with a more guilty air. "She was here five minutes ago. Where can she have disappeared to?"

It is but too obvious that in greeting and being greeted by their numerous acquaintances, both poor Amelia's chaperon and that chaperon's son have completely forgotten her existence. Always nervously afraid of being burdensome, Jim feels convinced from what he knows of her character that she is going about in un.o.btrusive forlornness, the extreme smallness of her Florentine acquaintances making it unlikely that she has found anyone to supply the place of the friends who have become so entirely oblivious of her. The conviction, p.r.i.c.king his conscience as he hastens contritely away from the vainly-repentant Byng, lends speed and keenness to his search. But thorough and earnest as it is, it is for some time quite unsuccessful. She makes one of no group, she loiters under no Banksia rose-bower, she is no gazer from the terrace at gold-misted valley or aureoled town, she is to be found neither in hidden nook, nor evident path. She is not beneath the loggia, she is nowhere out-of-doors. She must then, in her loneliness, have taken refuge in the house. He finds himself in a long, n.o.ble room, with a frescoed ceiling, a room full of signs of recent habitation and recent tea, but which has apparently been deserted for the sunset splendours on the terrace. He can see no single occupant. He walks slowly down it to a.s.sure himself of the fact of its entire emptiness.

By a singular and unaccountable freak of the builders, the windows are set so high in the wall that each has had to have a little raised das erected before it to enable the inmates to look comfortably out. Upon each small platform stands a chair or two, and low over them the curtains sweep. As he pa.s.ses one recess, he notices that the drapery is stirring a little, and examining more closely, sees the tail of a well-known gown--of that gown which has met with his nearest approach to approval among Amelia's rather scanty stock--peeping from beneath the stiff rich folds of the old Italian brocade. It is the work of a second to sweep the latter aside, and discover his poor _fiancee_ all alone, and crouching desolately in a low arm-chair. There is something so unlike her in the att.i.tude, something so different from her usual uncomplaining, unpretending fort.i.tude, something so disproportioned to the cause--his own careless but not criminal delay, as he supposes--in the despair evidenced by her whole pose, that he feels at once terrified and angry. In a second he, too, has stepped up on to the little platform beside her.

"Amelia!" he cries. "Amelia! What are you doing up here? With whom are you playing hide-and-seek?"

Her words and her smiles are apt to be prompt enough, Heaven knows, to spring out, answering his least hint; but now she neither speaks nor moves a muscle of her face. She scarcely starts at all at his sudden apparition and address, and no light comes across her features--those features which, now that he looks at them more closely, he sees to be set in a much more pinched pallor than even three watching nights and a week of airless worry can account for.

"Are you ill?"

"No; I am not ill."

The sting of irritation which, mixed with genuine alarm, had besieged Jim's mind on his first realizing her crouched and unnatural att.i.tude, now entirely supersedes any other feeling. Is the accidental delay of half an hour, an hour, say even an hour and a half, enough to justify such a parade of anguish as this?

"Is it possible," he inquires, in a tone of cold displeasure, "that I am to attribute this--this state of things--to my being accidentally late?

It was a mere accident: it is not like you to make a scene. I do not recognise you; I am very sorry that I was late, and that I have made you angry."

The chill reproach of his words seems to rouse her to a state more akin to her natural one, to the humble and unexacting one which is habitual to her.

"Angry!" she repeats: "angry with you for being late? Oh, you are quite mistaken! In all these years how often have I been angry with you?"

There is such a meek upbraiding in her tone that his ill-humour gives way to a vague apprehension.

"Then what is it?" he cries brusquely; "what is it all about? I think I have a right to ask you that; since I saw you last something must have happened to you to produce this extraordinary change."

She heaves a long dragging sigh.

"Something has happened to me; yes, something has happened!"

"But what--what kind of a something? I have a right to know--I insist upon knowing; tell me!"

He has grasped both her hands, whose unnatural coldness he feels even through her rather ill-fitting gloves. So strange and mean a thing is human nature that even at this moment it flashes across him, with a sense of annoyance, what bad gloves Amelia always wears. However, he is not troubled with them long, for she takes them and her cold hands quietly back.

"I will tell you, there is no question of insisting. I should have told you anyhow; but not _here_"--glancing nervously round the dropped curtains--"not now!"

"Why not here? Why not now?"

Her face quivers.

"I could not," she says piteously. "I do not quite know how I shall get through telling it; it must be somewhere--somewhere where it will not matter if I do break down!"

He stares at her in an unfeigned bewilderment, again slightly streaked with wrath.

"Have you gone mad, Amelia? or are you taking a leaf out of Sybilla's book? If you do not clear up this extraordinary mystification at once, I shall be compelled to believe either the one or the other."

Again her face contracts with pain.

"Oh, if it were only a mystification!" she says, with a low cry. "I cannot tell you here; it is physically impossible to me. But do not be afraid"--with an accent of bitterness, which he is quite at a loss to account for--"you shall not have long to wait; I will tell you, without fail, to-morrow; to-morrow morning, if you like. Come as early as you please, I shall be ready to tell you; and now would you mind leaving me?

I want to have a few moments to myself before I see anybody--before I see Mrs. Byng; will you please leave me?"

It is so apparent that she is in deadly earnest, and resolute to have her request complied with, that he can do nothing but step dizzily down off the little das, feeling as if the world were turning round with him.

A quarter of an hour later he sees her leaving the party with Mrs. Byng, looking as simple, as collected, and not very perceptibly paler than usual.

CHAPTER XX.

There is always something in the nature of a mountain in a night that is interposed between us and either any promised pleasure or any threatened pain. In the case of pleasure, we are naturally in a hurry to scale it, in order to see how full of suns.h.i.+ne and flowers is the happy valley on the other side; and in the case of pain, we are all scarcely less eager to ascertain how deep is the abyss, how choking the swamp, how angry the waves that wait us beyond the dusty hill.

Burgoyne has no expectation of finding anything agreeable on the further slope of his mountain, and yet the time seems long to him, till he has climbed its crest, and slidden down its other side. Early and splendid as is the new light that takes possession of him and his shutterless bedroom, he upbraids it as a laggard; and the hours that pace by till the one appointed for the explanation of yesterday's mystery seem to him to hobble on crutches. What can Amelia have to say to him that needs such a pomp of preparation? What can have turned Amelia into a Tragedy Queen? What miracle can have made her take the imperative mood? For it was the imperative mood unquestionably which, contrary to all precedent, she had made use of when she had commanded him, most gently it is true, since, being by her nature gentle, she can do nothing ungently, to leave her. He absolutely laughs at the topsy-turviness of the idea. What can she have to say that requires so carefully selected a spot to say it in?--a spot where "it does not matter if she does break down." What, in Heaven's name, can she be going to say that inspires her with such a cold-blooded intention beforehand of breaking down?

Jim's state of mind is something that of the Baron's in "On ne badine pas avec l'amour," on hearing that his daughter's governess had been turning somersaults in a field of luzerne. "Non, en verite, non, mon ami, je n'y comprends absolument rien. Tout cela me parait une conduite desordonnee, il est vrai, mais sans motif comme sans excuse." If she were any other woman, he should ascribe her behaviour to some tiresome but pa.s.sing tantrum, evoked by his delay in appearing? But in the past eight years how many hundred times has he kept her waiting? and has she ever failed to meet him with the same meek good-humour that has not had even a tinge of reproachful forgiveness in it. As she herself had said, "In all these years how often have I been angry with you?" He has been angry with her times out of mind, angry with her on a thousand unjust and unkind counts; angry with her for her slowness, her bad complexion, her want of a sense of humour; for a hundred things that she cannot help, that she would have altered--oh, how gladly!--if she could! But how often has she been angry with him? In vain he searches his memory, hoping to overtake some instance of ill-humour, or even pettishness, that may make the balance between them hang a little more equal. But in vain. She has never been angry with him. And even now neither her face nor her manner--whatever else of strange and unparalleled they may have conveyed--have conveyed the idea of anger.

But if not anger, what then can be the cause that has produced a change so startling in one so little given to impulsive action or eccentricities of emotion? Can she have heard anything about him?

anything to his discredit? He searches his conscience, but whether it be that that organ is not a particularly sensitive one, or that it really has no damaging facts to give up, it is silent, or almost so. He has perhaps been rather slack in his attendance upon her of late, but at her own bidding. At his visits to the Le Marchants' no one could take exception, dictated as they so obviously have been by philanthropy, and his conversations with Elizabeth--how few and scant! his heart heaves a rebellious sigh at their paucity--might be proclaimed without excision at the market cross. Our thoughts are our own, and are, moreover, so safely padlocked in our minds that he does not think it worth while to inquire whether, if his future wife could have looked in and seen the restive fancies capering, saddleless and bridleless, there, she might have been justified in a.s.suming a crouching att.i.tude and a sorrowfully commanding manner.

He is as far as ever from solving the problem, when--for once in his life before his time at the rendezvous--he presents himself at the familiar door. It is opened to him by Amelia herself. She has often done it before, seeming to know by instinct his ring from that of any other person, but to-day the familiar action disconcerts him. He had expected to be received with a formality and pomp of woe such as yesterday had seemed to threaten; and here is Amelia looking exactly like her ordinary self, except that she is perhaps rather more carefully dressed than usual; but that may be due to the fact of her having, for the first time, a.s.sumed the fresh calico gown, which the high summer of the Italian April morning seems to justify. Whether it be due to the calico gown or not, there is an indisputable air of gala about her, and she is smiling. A revulsion of feeling comes over the man, to whom her tragic semi-swooning airs had given a wakeful night. It was a tantrum after all, then; a storm in a teacup. And now her common sense has come to the rescue, and she has seen the folly of quarrelling with her bread and b.u.t.ter. These reflections naturally do not translate themselves into responsive smiles on his face, but she does not seem to notice his dour looks.

"I have a proposal to make to you," she says, still smiling. "Father is so well this morning, quite easy, and he has been wheeled into the sitting-room to see Sybilla. She has been very good about him this time, and quite believes that he has been really bad."

"How good of her!" comments Jim grimly; "it would be so easy and so amusing to play at having a swollen toe, would not it?"

"And so," continues Miss Wilson, wisely ignoring his fleer at her sister, "I am perfectly free, and I want you to take me somewhere, some little drive or expedition; you see," with a conciliatory glance at her own modest finery, "I counted upon your saying 'yes'; I dressed so as not to keep you waiting."

Every word of this sentence confirms Burgoyne in the idea implanted by her first address. This is her _amende_, and she is quite right to make it. But she would have been more right still if her conduct had not rendered it necessary.

Amelia is not the type of woman who through life will gain much by pouts. Perhaps, by-and-by, very kindly and delicately, he may obliquely hint this to her. But all that he says aloud is the rather stiff acquiescence conveyed in the words:

"By all means. I am quite at your service."

"And now where shall we go?" continues Amelia, shutting the door behind her and beginning to cross the hotel courtyard at his side; "that is the next thing--not to any gallery or church, I think, if you do not mind; I say such stupid things about Art, and the more I try, the stupider they are; let us go somewhere into the country--I can understand the country.