Alas! Part 23

I am not afraid of saying stupid things about it."

Into Burgoyne's mind comes the odious thought that he would not put it past his betrothed to say stupid things even about the Tuscan landscape, but he only awaits her decision in a respectful silence while helping her into a fiacre.

"It would be a sin to be under any roof to-day but this one," she says, looking up to the immeasurable azure bridge above her head; "would you mind--could you spare time to go to Fiesole?"

His only answer is to repeat the word Fiesole to the driver, who, with the inevitable tiny poodle-shaven dog beside him, is awaiting the order as to his destination. It is but a little way to Fiesole, as we all know, but yet, as the slow hired vehicle crawls up the steep ascent, with the driver walking alongside, or even lagging behind, there would be time and opportunity to say a good deal. But Amelia says next to nothing. Perhaps the heat makes her sleepy, for it is so hot, so hot between the garden walls, where the rose hedges are beginning to show a pale flush of plenteous pink among their mult.i.tude of green buds. Young, indeed, just born as the roses are, the highway dust has already powdered them with its ash-toned white. He does not know it at the time, but those dust-filmed rosebuds have found a home in his memory from which no after-sights, however numerous, will dislodge them. They have reached the village, and left their carriage, and begun, silently still, to ascend the steep lane up which the feet of most of Europe and America have in turn climbed to see the famous view that rewards the little effort. Past the cottages, whose inmates, tranquilly sitting in their doorways, or leaning idly against their door-posts, have probably seen all that is ill.u.s.trious, notorious, history-making of the day, pa.s.s pantingly. Is there a prime minister, a princess, a poet, a prima donna, of the time, that has not toiled up the steep path to the welcome rest of the bench on the high plateau, on the hillside? Jim and Amelia are certainly not likely to figure in the annals of their time, but the peasants look at them with as much or as little interest as if they were. An immortal, unless his immortality is printed on his back in letters as large as those that announce Colman's mustard to the world, has, to the vulgar, very much the air of one of themselves.

Our friends have reached the haven of the stone seat, and, thanks to the earliness of the hour, have it all to themselves, save for a trio of sunburnt women of the people, with handkerchiefs tied over their tanned heads, who tease them to buy straw hand-screens. And when they have bought a couple, and made it kindly but distinctly evident that no amount of worrying will induce them to buy any more, even these leave them in peace and descend the hill again, in search of newer victims.

They are alone under the sky's warm azure. Beneath their eyes spreads one of those n.o.bly lovely spectacles that Italy and spring, hand in hand, alone can offer. To some, indeed, it may seem that the prospect from the Bellosguardo side of the valley is even more beautiful, since Fiesole, sitting so high as she does, dwarfs the opposite hills, and makes the looker lose their wavy line. They seem flat in comparison, the plain appears wider, the beloved city more distant, and does not show the same exquisite distinctness of separate tower and spire and palace.

But yet such comparison is mere carping. Who can wish for a sight more divinely suave and fair than this from the bench above Fiesole? Not a breath of smoke dares to hang about the glorious old town, dimming its l.u.s.tre, and between them and it what a spread of manifold colour, of more "mingled hue" than the rainbow's "purfled scarf doth show!" The moon-tinted olives, twilight and ghostly, even in the dazzling radiance of this superb morning hour, with the blinding green of the young corn about their gray feet, the cypress taper-flames, the gay white houses, terrace gardened, and, above all, the vast smile of the Tuscan heaven.

At first Amelia's muteness seems natural and grateful to Jim, as the outcome of the awe and hush that exceeding beauty breathes on the human heart, but by-and-by, as it is prolonged beyond the limits that seem to him fit or agreeable, it begins to get on his nerves. After having so genuinely and wantonly alarmed him, has she brought him here, without any expressions of regret or remorse, simply to steep herself in a silent luxury of selfish enjoyment? After brooding resentfully on this idea for a considerable time, he translates it into speech.

"I thought that you had something to say to me?"

It seems as if her soul had gone out into the sun and April-painted champaign country, and that it is only with an effort and a sigh that she fetches it home again:

"So I have."

"And how much longer am I to wait for it?"

There is no indication of any capacity for patience in his tone.

She brings her look back from the s.h.i.+ning morning city, and fixes it wistfully upon him.

"Are you in such a hurry to hear?"

The pathetic streak in her voice, instead of conciliating, chafes him.

What is the sense of this paraphernalia of preliminaries? Why not come to the point at once? if indeed there is a point--a fact of which he begins to entertain grave doubts.

"I do not know what you call hurry," he replies drily; "I have been awaiting this mystic utterance for sixteen or seventeen hours."

Her sallow cheek takes on a pinky tinge of mortification at his accent.

"You are quite right," she answers quickly; "I have no business to keep you waiting. I meant to tell you as soon as we got here; I asked you to bring me here on purpose, only----"

"You told me that you must make the communication at some place where it would not matter if you did break down," says he, rather harshly helping her memory; "you must allow that that was not an encouraging exordium.

Do you look upon this"--glancing ironically round--"as a particularly suitable place for breaking down?"

Again that pain-evidencing wave of colour flows into her face. There is such an unloving mockery in his displeased voice.

"I shall not break down," she replies, forcing herself to speak with quiet composure; "you need not be afraid that I shall. I know that yesterday I was foolish enough to say the very words you quote, but I was not quite myself then; I did not quite know what I was saying; I had only just heard it."

"_It?_ What IT? Is this a new riddle? For Heaven's sake let us hear the answer to the first before we embark on any fresh one!"

"It is no riddle," replies she, her low patient tones contrasting with his exasperated ones, "nothing could be plainer; it was only that I happened to overhear something rather--rather painful--something that was not intended for me."

His angry cheek blanches as his thought flies arrow-quick to the one subject of his perennial apprehension. Someone has been poisoning her ear with cowardly libels, or yet more dreadful truths about Elizabeth Le Marchant. For a moment or two his tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth, then he says in a tone which he uselessly tries to make one of calm contempt alone:

"If you had lived longer in Florence, you would know how much importance to attach to its t.i.ttle-tattle and _cancans_."

She shakes her head with a sorrowful obstinacy.

"This was no t.i.ttle-tattle--no _cancan_."

Her answer seems but to confirm him in this first horrible suspicion.

"It is astonis.h.i.+ng," he says, in a strangled voice, "how ready even the best women are to believe evil; what--what evidence have you of the truth of--of these precious stories?"

"What evidence?" she repeats, fastening her sad eyes upon him--"the evidence of my own heart. I realize now that I have known it all along."

Read by the light of his fears, this response is so enigmatic that it dawns upon him with a flash of inexpressible solace that perhaps he may be on the wrong track after all. His ideas are precipitated into such a state of confusion by this blessed possibility that he can only echo in a stupefied tone:

"Have known what all along?"

She has turned round on the stone bench upon which they have hitherto been sitting side by side, and, as he in the eagerness of his listening has done the same thing, they are now opposite to one another, and he feels as well as sees her hungry eyes devouring his face.

"That you are sick of me," she answers, in a heart-wrung whisper, "sick to death of me--that was what she said."

It is impossible to deny that Burgoyne's first impulse is one of relief.

He has been mistaken, then. Elizabeth's secret is in the same state of precarious safety as her enemy's departure from Florence had left it in.

His second impulse--our second impulses are mostly our best ones, equally free from the headlongness of our first, and the cold worldly wisdom of our third--is one of genuine indignation, concern, and amazement.

"What who said?"

"Mrs. Byng."

His stupefaction deepens.

"_Mrs. Byng_--Mrs. Byng told you that I was sick of you? Sick to death of you?"

"Oh, no," she cries, even her emotion giving way to her eagerness to correct this misapprehension, "she did not tell _me_ so! How could you imagine such a thing? She is far, far too kind-hearted; she would not hurt a fly intentionally, and would be exceedingly pained if she thought I had overheard her."

He shrugs his shoulders despairingly.

"_Je m'y perds!_ She told you, and she did not tell you; you heard, and you did not hear."

"I am telling it very stupidly, I know," she says apologetically, "very confusedly; and of course I can't expect you to understand by instinct how it was." She sighs profoundly, and then goes on quickly, and no longer looking at him. "You know she took me to the party, but when we reached the villa, I found that she knew so many people, and I so few, that I should only be a burden to her if I kept continually by her side, and as I was rather tired--you know that I had not been in bed for two or three nights--I thought I would go into the house and rest, so as to be quite fresh by the time you came. I fancied it was not unlikely you might be a little late."

His conscience, at the unintentional reproach of this patient supposition, reminds him of its existence by a sharp p.r.i.c.k. How many times has her poor vanity suffered the bruise of being long first at the rendezvous?

"I discovered that chair by the window under the curtain, the one where you found me."

"Well?"

"It was so quiet there, as everybody was in the garden, that I suppose I fell asleep; at least I remember nothing more until suddenly I heard Mrs. Byng's voice saying----"

"Saying what?"