Alas! Part 28

"I suppose," says Elizabeth presently, in a reflective tone, "that the fact is, when people are in your position--I mean on the brink of a great deep happiness--they forget all lesser things?"

He s.n.a.t.c.hes a hasty glance of suspicion at her. Is this her revenge for his neglect of her? But nothing can look more innocent or less ironical than her small profile, bent towards the gigantic forget-me-nots and the pulmonaria, azure as gentians.

"Perhaps."

"The big fish"--her little face breaking into one of her lovely smiles, which, by a turn of her head from side to full, she offers in its completeness to his gaze--"swallows up all the little gudgeons! Poor little gudgeons."

"Poor little gudgeons!" he echoes stupidly, and then begins to laugh at his own wool-gathering.

"And now I suppose you will be going directly--going home?" pursues she, looking at him and his laughter with a soft surprise.

"I hope so; and--and--you too?"

She gives a start, and the sky-coloured nosegay in her hand drops into her lap.

"We--we? Why should _we_ go home? We have nothing pleasant to go to, and"--looking round with a pa.s.sionate relish at mountain, and suffused far plain, and sappy spring gra.s.s--"we are so well--so infinitely well here!" Then, pulling herself together, and speaking in a more composed key, "But yes, of course we, too, shall go by-and-by; this cannot last for ever--nothing lasts for ever. That is the one thought that has kept me alive all these years; but now----"

She breaks off.

"But now?"

Even as he watches her, putting this echoed interrogation, he sees the radiance breaking through the cloud his question had gathered, as a very strong sun breaks through a very translucent exhalation.

"But now?" she repeats vaguely, and smiling to herself, forgetful of his very presence beside her--"But now? Did I say 'But now?' Ah, here they are back again!"

CHAPTER XXIII.

"I am going to turn the tables on you," says Amelia next morning to her lover, after the usual endearments, which of late he has been conscientiously anxious not to scant or slur, have pa.s.sed between them, very fairly executed by him, and adoringly accepted and returned by her; "you are always arranging treats for me; now I have planned one for you!"

She looks so beaming with benevolent joy as she makes this statement, that Jim stoops and drops an extra kiss--not in the bond--upon her lifted face. "Indeed, dear!" he answers kindly, "I do not quite know what I have done to deserve it; but I hope it is a nice one."

"It is very nice--delightful."

"Delightful, eh?" echoes he, raising his brows, while a transient wonder crosses his mind as to what project she or anyone else could suggest to him that, at this juncture of his affairs, could merit that epithet; "well, am I to guess what it is? or are you going to tell me?"

Amelia's face still wears that smile of complacent confidence in having something pleasant to communicate which has puzzled her companion.

"We have never been at Vallombrosa, have we?" asks she.

"Never."

"Well, we are going there to-morrow."

"Are we? is that your treat?" inquires he, wondering what of peculiarly and distinctively festal for him this expedition may be supposed to have above all their former ones.

"And we are not going alone."

"There is nothing very exceptional in that; Cecilia is mostly good enough to lend us her company."

"I am not thinking of Cecilia; I have persuaded"--the benevolent smile broadening across her cheeks--"I have persuaded some friends of yours to join us."

It does not for an instant cross his mind either to doubt or to affect uncertainty as to who the friends of whom she speaks may be; but the suggestion is so profoundly unwelcome to him, that not even the certainty of mortifying the unselfish creature before him can hinder him from showing it. Her countenance falls.

"You are not glad?" she asks crestfallenly, "you are not pleased?"

It is impossible for him to say that he is, and all that is left to him is to put his vexation into words that may be as little as possible fraught with disappointment to his poor hearer's ear.

"I--I--had rather have had you to myself."

"Would you really?" she asks, in the almost awed tones of one who, from being quite dest.i.tute, has had the Koh-i-Noor put into his hand, and whose fingers are afraid to close over the mighty jewel; "would you really? then I am sorry I asked them; but"--with intense wistfulness--"if you only knew how I long to give you a little pleasure, a little enjoyment--you who have given me so infinitely much."

If Miss Wilson were ever addicted to the figure of speech called irony, she might be supposed to be employing it now; but one glance at her simple face would show that it expressed nothing but adoring grat.i.tude.

Her one good fortnight has spread its radiant veil backwards over her eight barren years.

He takes her hand, and pa.s.ses the fingers across his lips, murmuring indistinctly and guiltily behind them:

"Do I really make you happy?"

"Do you?"--echoes she, while the transfiguring tears well into her glorified pale eyes--"I should not have thought it possible that so much joy could have been packed into any fortnight as I have had crammed into mine!"

They have to set off to Vallombrosa at seven o'clock in the morning, an hour at which few of us are at our cleverest, handsomest, or our best tempered; nor is the party of six, either in its proportion of women to men--four to two--or in its component parts, a very well adjusted one.

They are too numerous to be contained in one carriage, and are therefore divided into two separate bands--three and three. Whether by some manoeuvre of the well-meaning Amelia, or by some scarcely fortunate accident, Burgoyne finds himself seated opposite to his betrothed and to Elizabeth; while Byng follows in the second vehicle as _vis-a-vis_ to Cecilia and Mrs. Le Marchant. There is a general feeling of wrongness about the whole arrangement--a sense of mental discomfort equivalent to that physical one of having put on your clothes inside out, or b.u.t.toned your b.u.t.tons into unanswering b.u.t.tonholes.

Mrs. Le Marchant's face, as Burgoyne catches sight of it now and then, as some turn in the road reveals the inmates of the closely-following second carriage to his view, wears that uneasy and disquieted look which always disfigures it when there is any question of her being brought into personal relation with strangers. And Elizabeth, of whom he has naturally a much nearer and more continuous view, is plainly ill-at-ease. Miss Wilson has not thought it necessary to mention to her lover how strong had been the opposition to her plan on the part of the objects of it; nor, that it was only because her proposal was made _viva voce_, and therefore unescapable, that it had been reluctantly accepted at last. At first Burgoyne had attributed Elizabeth's evident ill-at-easeness to her separation from Byng; but he presently discovers that it is what she possesses, and not what she lacks, that is the chief source of her _malaise_. During the latter part of his own personal intercourse with her she had been, when in his company, sometimes sad, sometimes wildly merry; but always entirely natural. Strange as it may seem, it is obviously the presence of Amelia that puts constraint upon her. Before the spirit of that most unterrifying of G.o.d's creatures, Elizabeth's "stands rebuked." Once or twice he sees her inborn gaiety--that gaiety whose existence he has so often noted as it struggles up from under the mysterious weight of sorrow laid upon it--spurt into life, only to be instantly killed by the rea.s.sumption of that nervous formal manner which not all Amelia's gentle efforts can break through.

A very grave trio they drive along through the grave day. For it is, alas! a grave day--overcast, now turning to rain, now growing fair again awhile. Not a grain of Italy's summer curse, her choking white dust, a.s.sails their nostrils. It must have rained all night. Through the suburbs by the river, crossing and recrossing that ugly iron interloper the railway; by the river flowing at the foot of the fair green hills, so green, so green on this day of ripe accomplished spring. The whole country is one giant green garland, of young wheat below and endless vine necklaces above--necklaces of new juicy, just-born, yet vigorous vine-leaves. The very river runs green with the reflection of the endless verdure on its banks. The road is level as far as Ponta.s.sieve, the town through which they roll, and then it begins to mount--mounts between garden-like hills, dressed in vine leaves and iris-flowers, and the dull fire of red clover; while the stream twists in flowing companions.h.i.+p at the valley bottom, until they turn abruptly away from it, up into a steep and narrow valley, almost a gorge, and climb up and up one side of it, turning and winding continually to break the steepness of the ascent. However broken, it is steep still. But who would wish to pa.s.s at more than a foot's pace through this great sheet of lilac irises wrapping the mountain side, past this bean-field that greets the nostrils with its homely familiar perfume, along this wealthy bit of hedge, framed wholly of honeysuckle in flower? At sight of the latter Elizabeth gives a little cry.

"Oh, what honeysuckle! I must have some! I must get out! Tell him to stop!"

In a moment her commands are obeyed; in another moment Byng has sprung out of the second carriage and is standing beside her. The door of Byng's vehicle is stiff apparently, and a sardonic smile breaks over the elder man's face as he hears the noise of the resounding kicks administered to it by the younger one's impatient foot. But he need not have been in such a hurry--no one interferes with his office of rifling the hedge of its creamy and coral bugles.

Burgoyne gets out of the carriage; but it is only to walk to the other one and a.s.sume Byng's vacated seat.

"Are you going to change places?" Amelia has asked rather chapfallenly as he leaves her; and he has given her hand a hasty pressure, and answered affectionately--

"It will not be for long, dear; but you know"--with an expressive glance, and what he rather too sanguinely hopes looks like a smile in the direction of the flower-gatherers--"fair play is a jewel!"

If his departure from the one vehicle is deplored, it is not welcomed at the other. Cecilia asks the same question as her sister had put, though the intonation is different.

"Are you going to change places?"--adding--"do not you think we did very well as we were?"

But probably he is too much occupied in wrestling with the stiff door to hear her, for he makes no answer beyond getting in. The only reward that he receives for his piece of self-sacrifice is a rapturous look of grat.i.tude from Byng, when he perceives the changed position of his affairs, and that recompense Jim had far rather have been without.