Alas! Part 24

"Her son was with her--he had brought her in to have some tea; it was to him that she was speaking; she was asking him about me, where I was?

where he had left me? whether he had seen me lately? And then she said, 'Poor Amelia, Jim really does neglect her shamefully; and yet one cannot help being sorry for him, too; it was such child-stealing in the first instance, and he is evidently dead-sick of her! It is so astonis.h.i.+ng that she does not see it!'"

There is something almost terrible in the calm distinctness with which Amelia repeats the sentences that had laid the card-house of her happiness in the dust. Certainly she keeps her promise to him to the letter; she gives no lightest sign of breaking down. There is not a tear in her eye, not a quiver in her voice. After a moment's pause, she continues:

"And then he, Mr. Byng, answered, 'Poor soul, it--it _is_ odd! She must have the hide of a hippopotamus.'"

Amelia has finished her narrative, repeating the young man's galling comment, with the same composure as his mother's humiliatingly compa.s.sionate ones; and for a s.p.a.ce her sole auditor is absolutely incapable of making any criticism upon it. He is forbidden, if he had wished it, to offer her even the mute amends of a dumb endearment, by the reappearance on the scene of a couple of the sun-scorched peasant torments with their straw hand-screens. It is not likely that those so lately bought should have worn out already; but yet they renew their importunities with such a determined obstinacy, as if they knew this to be the case; and it is not until they are lightened of two more, that they consent once again to retire, leaving the warm bright plateau to the lovers--if indeed they can be called such.

CHAPTER XXI.

"True, be it said, whatever man it said, That love with gall and honey doth abound; But if the one be with the other way'd, For every dram of honey therein found A pound of gall doth over it redound."

"She was perfectly right," says Amelia, still speaking quite quietly; "it is astonis.h.i.+ng that I should not have seen it; and it _was_ child-stealing; you were barely twenty-one, and I--I was not very young for a woman even then--I was twenty-three. I ought to have known better."

For once in his life Burgoyne is absolutely bereft of speech. It is always a difficult matter to rebut a charge of being dead sick of a woman without conveying an insult in the very denial; and when there lies a horrid substratum of truth under the exaggeration of the accusation, the difficulty becomes an impossibility.

"However, it might have been much worse," continues Miss Wilson; "just think if I had overheard it only after I had married you, when I knew that there was nothing but death that could rid you of me. I thank G.o.d I have heard it in time."

His throat is still too dry for him to speak; but he stretches out his arm to encircle her in a mute protest at that thanksgiving over her own s.h.i.+pwreck; but, for the first time in her life, she eludes his caress.

"Child-stealing," she repeats, under her breath; "and yet"--with a touching impulse of apology and deprecation--"you seemed old for your age; you seemed so much in earnest; I think you really were;"--a wistful pause--"and afterwards, though of course I could not help seeing that I was not to you what you were to me, yet I thought--I hoped that if I waited--if I was patient--if no one else--no one more worthy of you came between us"--another and still wistfuller delay in her halting speech--"you might grow a little fond of me, out of long habit; I never expected you to be more than a little fond of me!"

He has entirely hidden his face in his two hands, so that she is without that index to guide her as to the effect produced by her words, and he continues completely silent. Whether, even after her rude awakening, she still, deep in her heart, cherishes some pale hope of a denial, an explaining away of the reported utterances, who shall say? It is with a half-choked sigh that she goes on:

"But you could not; I am not so unjust as not to know that you tried your best. Poor fellow! it must have been uphill work for you"--with a first touch of bitterness--"_labouring_ to love me, for eight years; is it any wonder that you failed? and I was so thick-skinned I did not see it--the '_hide of a hippopotamus_' indeed! There could not be a juster comparison; and now all I can do is to beg your pardon for having spoilt eight of your best years--_your best years_"--with slow iteration; "but come"--more lightly--"you have some very good ones left too; you are still quite young; for a man you are quite young; the harm I have done you is not irreparable; I think"--with an accent of reproach--"you might ease my mind by telling me that the harm I have done you is not irreparable!"

Thus appealed to, it is impossible for him any longer to maintain his att.i.tude of disguise and concealment. His hands must needs be withdrawn from before his face; and, as he turns that face towards her, she perceives with astonishment, almost consternation, that there is an undoubted tear in each of his hard gray eyes.

"And what about the harm I have done to you?" he asks under his breath, as if having no confidence in his voice; "what about the eight best years of _your_ life?"

A look of affection, so high and tender and selfless, as to seem to remove her love out of the category of the mortal and the transitory, dawns and grows in her wan face.

"Do not fret about them," she answers soothingly, "they were--they always will have been--the eight best years of my life. They were full of good and pleasant things. Do not forget--I would not for worlds have you forget--I shall never forget myself--that they all came to me through you!"

At her words, most innocent as they are of any intention of producing such an effect, a hot flush of shame rises to his very forehead, as his memory presents to him the successive eras into which these eight good years had divided themselves: six months of headlong boyish pa.s.sion; six months of cooling fever; and seven years of careless, intermittent, matter-of-course, half-tenderness.

"Through _me_?" he repeats, with an accent of the deepest self-abas.e.m.e.nt; "you do not mean to be ironical, dear; you were never such a thing in your life; you could not be if you tried; but if you knew what a _sweep_ you make me feel when you say the sort of thing you have just said!--and so it is all to come to an end, is it? Good as these eight years have been, you have had enough of them? You do not want any more like them?"

She says neither yes nor no. He remains unanswered, unless the faint smile in her weary eyes and about her drooped mouth can count for a reply.

"And all because you have heard some fool say that I was tired of you?"

The tight smile spreads a little wider, and invades her pale cheeks.

"Worse than tired! _sick! sick to death!_"

She is looking straight before her, at the landscape simmering in the climbing sun, the divine landscape new and young as it was before duomo and bell-tower sprang and towered heavenwards. Why should her gaze dwell any more upon him? She has renounced him, her eyes must fain renounce him too. As he hears her words, as he watches her patient profile, the sole suffering thing in the universal morning joy, a great revulsion of feeling, a great compa.s.sion mixed with as large a remorse pours in torrent over his heart. These emotions are so strong that they make him deceive even himself as to their nature. It seems to him as if scales had suddenly fallen from his eyes, showing him how profoundly he prizes the now departing good, telling him that life can neither ask nor give anything better than the undemanding, selfless, boundless love about to withdraw its shelter from him. His arm steals round her waist, and not once does it flash across his mind--as, to his shame be it spoken, it has often flashed before--what a long way it has to steal!

"Am I sick of you, Amelia?"

She makes no effort to release herself. It does him no harm that she should once more rest within his clasp. But she still looks straight before her at lucent Firenze and her olives, and says three times, accompanying each repet.i.tion of the word with a sorrowful little head-shake:

"Yes! _yes!_ YES!"

He will compel her to look at him, his own Amelia. Have not all her tender looks been his for eight long years? He puts out his disengaged hand, and with it determinately turns her poor quivering face round so as to meet his gaze.

"Am I sick of you, Amelia?"

In the emotion of the moment, it appears to him as if there were something almost ludicrously improbable and lying about that accusation, in which, when first brought against him, his guilty soul had admitted more than a grain of truth. Her faded eyes turn to his, like flowers to their sun; the veracity of his voice and of his eager gray orbs--still softened from their habitual severity by the tears that had so lately wet them--making such a hope, as, five minutes ago, she had thought never again to cherish, leap into splendid life in her sick heart.

"Is it possible?" she murmurs, almost inaudibly, "do you mean--that you are _not_?"

They go down the hill, past the cottages, and the incurious peasants, hand in hand, her soul running over with a deep joy; and his occupied by an unfamiliar calm, that is yet backed by an ache of remorse, and by--what else? That "else" he himself neither could nor would define. He spends the whole of that day with Amelia, both lunching and dining with her and her family; a course which calls forth expressions of unaffected surprise, not at all tinctured with malice--unless it be in the case of Sybilla, who has never been partial to him--from each of them.

"We have been thinking that Jim was going to jilt you, Amelia!" Cecilia has said with graceful badinage; nor, strange to say, has she been at all offended when Jim has retorted, with equal grace and much superior ill-nature, that on such a subject no one could speak with more authority than she.

The large white stars are making the nightly sky almost as gorgeous as the day's departed majesty had done, ere Jim finds himself back at his hotel. His intention of quietly retreating to his own room is traversed by Byng, who, having evidently been on the watch for him, springs up the stairs, three steps at a time, after him.

"Where have you been all day?" he inquires impatiently.

"At the Anglo-Americain. I wonder you are not tired of always asking the same question and receiving the same answer to it."

"I am not so sure that I should always receive the same answer," replies the other, with a forced laugh--"but stop a bit!"--seeing a decided quickening of speed in his friend's upward movements--"my mother is asking for you; she has been asking for you all the afternoon; she wants to speak to you before she goes."

"_Goes?_"

"Yes, she is off at seven o'clock to-morrow morning--back to England: she had a telegram to-day to say that her old aunt, the one who brought her up, has had a second stroke. No!"--seeing Jim begin to arrange his features in that decorous shape of grave sympathy which we naturally a.s.sume on such occasions--"it is no case of great grief; the poor old woman has been quite silly ever since her last attack; but mother thinks that she ought to be there, at--at the end; to look after things, and so forth."

There is an alertness, a something that expresses the reverse of regret in the tone employed by Mrs. Byng's son in this detailed account of the causes of her imminent departure, which, even if his thoughts had not already sprung in that direction, would have set Burgoyne thinking as to the mode in which the young man before him is likely to employ the liberty that his parent's absence will restore to him.

"I offered to go with her," says Byng, perhaps discerning a portion at least of his companion's disapprobation.

"And she refused?"

Byng looks down, and begins to kick the banisters--they are still on the stairs--idly with one foot.

"Mother is so unselfish that it is always difficult to make out what she really wishes; but--but I do not quite see of what use I should be to her if I did go."

There is a moment's pause; then Burgoyne speaks, in a dry, hortatory elder brother's voice:

"If you take my advice you will go home."